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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Happy End, by Joseph Hergesheimer
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Happy End
+
+Author: Joseph Hergesheimer
+
+
+Release Date: April, 2005  [EBook #7843]
+This file was first posted on May 22, 2003
+Last Updated: March 12, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAPPY END ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, Joshua
+Hutchinson, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE HAPPY END
+
+By Joseph Hergesheimer
+
+
+
+Books By Joseph Hergesheimer
+
+  The Happy End
+  Java Head
+  Gold And Iron
+  The Three Black Pennys
+  Mountain Blood
+  The Lay Anthony
+
+
+
+
+THE HAPPY END
+
+
+
+DEDICATION
+
+
+These stories have but one purpose--to give pleasure; and they have been
+made into a book at the requests of those I have fortunately pleased. It
+is, therefore, to such friends of my writing that they are addressed and
+dedicated. However, this is not an effort to avoid my responsibility:
+but to whom? Not to critics, not middlemen, nor the Academies of which
+I am so reprehensibly ignorant; not, certainly, to my neighbor. They
+brought me, in times of varying difficulty, food; and for that excellent
+reason I am forced to conclude that, then as now, I am responsible to my
+grocer.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+  Lonely Valleys
+  The Egyptian Chariot
+  The Flower of Spain
+  Tol'able David
+  Bread
+  Rosemary Roselle
+  The Thrush in the Hedge
+
+
+
+
+LONELY VALLEYS
+
+
+The maid, smartly capped in starched ruffled muslin and black, who
+admitted them to the somber luxury of the rectory, hesitated in
+unconcealed sulky disfavor.
+
+“Doctor Goodlowe has hardly started dinner,” she asserted.
+
+“Just ask him to come out for a little,” the man repeated.
+
+He was past middle age, awkward in harsh ill-fitting and formal clothes
+and with a gaunt high-boned countenance and clear blue eyes.
+
+His companion, a wistfully pale girl under an absurd and expensive hat,
+laid her hand in an embroidered white silk glove on his arm and said in
+a low tone: “We won't bother him, Calvin. There are plenty of ministers
+in Washington; or we could come back later.”
+
+“There are, and we could,” he agreed; “but we won't. I'm not going to
+wait a minute more for you, Lucy. Not now that you are willing. Why, I
+have been waiting half my life already.”
+
+I
+
+A gaunt young man with clear blue eyes sat on the bank of a mountain
+road and gazed at the newly-built house opposite. It was the only
+dwelling visible. Behind, the range rose in a dark wall against the
+evening sky; on either hand the small green valley was lost in a blue
+haze of serried peaks. The house was not imposing; in reality small,
+but a story and a half, it had a length of three rooms with a kitchen
+forming an angle, invisible from where Calvin Stammark sat; an outside
+chimney at each end, and a narrow covered portico over the front door.
+
+An expiring clatter of hoofs marked the departure of the neighbor who
+had helped Calvin set the last flanged course. It seemed incredible that
+it was finished, ready--when the furniture and bright rag carpet had
+been placed--for Hannah. “The truck patch will go in there on the
+right,” he told himself; “and gradually I'll get the slope cleared out,
+corn and buckwheat planted.”
+
+He twisted about, facing the valley. It was deep in grass, watered with
+streams like twisting shining ribbons, and held a sleek slow-grazing
+herd of cattle.
+
+The care of the latter, a part of Senator Alderwith's wide possessions,
+was to form Calvin's main occupation--for the present anyhow. Calvin
+Stammark had larger plans for his future with Hannah. Some day he would
+own the Alderwith pastures at his back and be grazing his own steers.
+
+His thoughts returned to Hannah, and he rose and proceeded to where
+a saddled horse was tied beside the road. He ought to go back to
+Greenstream and fix up before seeing her; but with their home all built,
+his impatience to be with her was greater than his sense of propriety,
+and he put his horse at a sharp canter to the left.
+
+Calvin continued down the valley until the road turned toward the
+range and an opening which he followed into a steeper and narrower rift
+beyond. Here there were no clearings in the rocky underbrush until he
+reached Richmond Braley's land. A long upturning sweep ended at the
+house, directly against the base of the mountain; and without decreasing
+his gait he passed over the faintly traced way, by the triangular sheep
+washing and shearing pen, to the stabling shed.
+
+Hannah's mother was bending fretfully over the kitchen stove, and
+Richmond, her father, was drawing off sodden leather boots. He was a
+man tall and bowed, stiff but still powerful, with a face masked in an
+unkempt tangle of beard.
+
+“H'y, Calvin,” he cried; “you're just here for spoon licking! Lucy was
+looking for company.” Mrs. Braley's comment was below her breath, but
+it was plainly no corroboration of her husband's assurance. “You'll find
+Hannah in the front of the house,” Richmond added. Hannah was sitting on
+the stone steps at the side entrance to the parlor. As usual she had
+a bright bow in the hair streaming over her back, and her feet were
+graceful in slippers with thin black stockings. She kissed him willingly
+and studied him with wide-opened hazel-brown eyes. There wasn't another
+girl in Greenstream, in Virginia, with Hannah's fetching appearance, he
+decided with a glow of adoration. She had a--a sort of beauty entirely
+her own; it was not exactly prettiness, but a quality far more
+disturbing, something a man could never forget.
+
+“She's done,” he told her abruptly.
+
+“What?” Hannah gazed up at him with a dim sweetness in the gathering
+dusk.
+
+“What!” he mocked her. “You ought to be ashamed to ask. Why, the
+house--our home. We could move in by a week if we were called to. We can
+get married any time.”
+
+She now looked away from him, her face still and dreaming.
+
+“You don't seem overly anxious,” Calvin declared.
+
+“It's just the idea,” she replied. “I never thought of it like this
+before--right on a person.” She sighed. “Of course it will be nice,
+Calvin.”
+
+He sat below her with an arm across her slim knees. “I'm going to dig
+right into the truck patch; there's a parcel of poles cut for the beans.
+It won't be much the first year; but wait and we'll show people how to
+live.” He repeated his vision in connection with the present Alderwith
+holdings.
+
+“I wonder will we ever be rich like the senator?”
+
+“Certainly,” he answered with calm conviction. “A man couldn't be
+shiftless with you to do for, Hannah. He'd be obliged to have everything
+the best.”
+
+“It'll take a long while though,” she continued.
+
+“We will have to put in some hard licks,” he admitted. “But we are
+young; we've got a life to do it in.”
+
+“A man has, but I don't know about girls. It seems like they get old
+faster; and then things--silk dresses don't do them any good. How would
+ma look in fashionable clothes!”
+
+“You won't have to wait that long,” he assured her. “Your father has
+never hurt himself about the place, there's no money in sheep; and as
+for Hosmer--you know well as me that he is nothing outside of the bank
+and his own comfort. Store clothes is Hosmer all through.”
+
+“I wish you were a little like him there,” Hannah returned.
+
+He admitted that this evening he was more untidy than need be. “I just
+couldn't wait to see you,” he declared; “with our place and--and all so
+safe and happy.”
+
+II
+
+The Braley table, spread after the Greenstream custom in the kitchen,
+was surrounded by Richmond and Calvin--Hosmer had stayed late at the
+bank--Hannah and Susan, the eldest of the children, prematurely aged and
+wasted by a perpetual cough, while Lucy Braley moved carelessly between
+the stove and the table. At rare intervals she was assisted by Hannah,
+who bore the heavy dishes in a silent but perceptible air of protest.
+
+Calvin Stammark liked this; it was a part of her superiority to the
+other girls of the locality. He made up his mind that she should never
+lose her present gentility. Whenever he could afford it Hannah must
+have help in the house. No greater elegance was imaginable. Senator
+Alderwith, at his dwelling with its broad porch, had two servants--two
+servants and a bathtub with hot water running right out of a tap. And he
+Calvin Stammark, would have the same, before Hannah and he were too old
+to enjoy it.
+
+He had eleven hundred dollars now, after buying the land about
+his house. When the right time came he would invest it in more
+property--grazing, a few herd of cattle and maybe in timber. Calvin had
+innumerable schemes for their betterment and success. To all this the
+sheer fact of Hannah was like the haunting refrain of a song. She was
+never really out of his planning. He might be sitting on his rooftree
+squaring the shingling; bargaining with Eli Goss, the stone-cutter;
+renewing the rock salt for Alderwith's steers; but running through every
+occupation was the memory of Hannah's pale distracting face, the scarlet
+thread of the lips she was continually biting, her slender solid body.
+
+He had heard that her mother was like that when she was young; but
+looking at Mrs. Braley's spent being, hearing her thin complaining
+voice, it seemed impossible. People who had known her in her youth
+asserted that it was so. Phebe too, they said, was the same--Phebe who
+had left Greenstream nine years ago, when she was seventeen, to become
+an actress in the great cities beyond the mountains. This might or
+might not be a fact. Calvin always doubted that any one else could have
+Hannah's charm.
+
+However, he had never seen Phebe; he had moved from a distant part of
+the county to the principal Greenstream settlement after she had gone.
+But the legend of Phebe's beauty and talent was a part of the Braley
+household. Mrs. Braley told it as a distinguished trait that Phebe would
+never set her hand in hot dishwater. Calvin noted that Hannah was often
+blamed for domestic negligence, but this and far more advanced conduct
+in Phebe was surrounded by a halo of superiority.
+
+After supper, in view of the fact of their courtship, Calvin and Hannah
+were permitted to sit undisturbed in the formality of the parlor. The
+rest of the family congregated with complete normality in the kitchen.
+The parlor was an uncomfortable chamber with uncomfortable elaborate
+chairs in orange plush upholstery, a narrow sofa, an organ of highly
+varnished lightwood ornamented with scrolled fretwork, and a cannon
+stove with polished brass spires.
+
+Calvin sat on the sofa with an arm about Hannah's waist, while she
+twisted round her finger the ring he had given her, a ring of warranted
+gold clasping a large red stone. Her throat was circled by a silver
+chain supporting a mounted polished Scotch pebble, his gift as well.
+Their position was conventional; Calvin's arm was cramped from its
+unusual position, he had to brace his feet to keep firm on the slippery
+plush, but he was dazed with delight. His heart throbs were evident in
+his wrists and throat, while a tenderness of pity actually wet his eyes.
+At times he spoke in a hushed voice, phrases meaningless in word but
+charged with inarticulate emotion; Hannah replied more coherently; but
+for the most they were silent. She accepted the situation with evident
+calm as an inevitable part of life. Drawn against him she rested her
+head lightly on his shoulder, her gaze speculative and undisturbed.
+
+Once he exclaimed: “I don't believe you love me! I don't believe you're
+interested in the things for the kitchen or the bedroom suite I saw in a
+catalogue at Priest's store!”
+
+“Don't be silly!” she murmured. “Why shouldn't I be when it's my own,
+when it's all I'm going to have.”
+
+He cried bravely. “It's only the beginning! Wait till you see our cattle
+herded over the mountain to the railroad; wait till you see a spur come
+up the Sugarloaf and haul away our hardwood. Just you wait----”
+
+There was the clip-clip of a horse outside, and the creaking of wheels.
+
+“I believe that's Hosmer.” Hannah rose. “It's funny, too, because he
+said he'd have to stay at the hotel to-night, there was so much settling
+up at the bank.”
+
+It was, however, Hosmer Braley. He paused at the parlor door, a man in
+the vicinity of thirty, fat in body and carefully clad, with a white
+starched collar and figured satin tie.
+
+“I didn't want to drive out,” he said, at once bland and aggrieved; “but
+it couldn't be helped. Here's a piece of news for all of you--Phebe is
+coming home to visit She wrote me to say so, and I only got the letter
+this evening. Whatever do you suppose took her?”
+
+Hannah at once flushed with excitement--like, Calvin Stammark thought,
+the parlor lamp with the pink shade, turned up suddenly. An instant
+vague depression settled over him; Hannah, only the minute before in his
+arms, seemed to draw away from him, remote and unconcerned by anything
+but Phebe's extraordinary return. Hosmer made it clear that the event
+promised nothing but annoyance for him.
+
+“She's coming by to-morrow's stage,” he went on, untouched by the
+sensation his information had wrought in the kitchen; “and it's certain
+I can't meet her. The bank's sending me into West Virginia about some
+securities.”
+
+Richmond Braley, it developed further, was bound to a day's work on the
+public roads. They turned to Calvin.
+
+“Take my buggy,” Hosmer offered; “I'll have to go from Durban by rail.”
+
+There was no reason why he shouldn't meet Phebe Braley, Calvin realized.
+He lingered, gazing with silent longing at Hannah, but it was evident
+that she had no intention of returning to the parlor.
+
+III
+
+Waiting in Hosmer's buggy for the arrival of the Greenstream stage and
+Phebe Braley, Calvin was conscious of the persistence of the depression
+that had invaded him at the announcement of her visit. He resented,
+too, the new element thrust into the Braley household, disrupting the
+familiar course of his love. Hannah had been unreasonably distracted by
+the actuality of Phebe's return--the Phebe who had gone away from the
+mountains and become an actress.
+
+The buggy was drawn to one side of the principal Greenstream road,
+at the post-office. Before him the way crossed the valley and lifted
+abruptly to the slope of the eastern range. At his back the village--the
+brick Methodist church and the white painted Presbyterian church, the
+courthouse with its dignified columns, the stores at the corners of the
+single crossroads, and varied dwellings--was settling into the elusive
+May twilight. The highest peaks in the east were capped with dissolving
+rose by the lowering sun, and the sky was a dusty blue.
+
+Calvin Stammark heard the approaching stage before he saw it; then the
+long rigid surrey with its spare horses rapidly rolled up over the open
+road to the post-office. He got down and moved diffidently forward,
+seeing and recognizing Phebe immediately. This was made possible by her
+resemblance to Hannah; and yet, Calvin added, no two women could be more
+utterly different.
+
+Phebe Braley had a full figure--she was almost stout--a body of the
+frankest emphasized curves in a long purple coat with a collar of soiled
+white fur. A straw hat with the brim caught by a short purple-dyed
+ostrich feather was pinned to a dead-looking crinkled mass of
+greenish-gold hair, and her face--the memorable features of Hannah--was
+loaded with pink powder.
+
+Calvin said: “You must be Phebe Braley. Well, I'm Calvin Stammark. Your
+father or Hosmer couldn't meet the stage and so they had to let me get
+you. Where's your bag?”
+
+She adopted at once an air of comfortable familiarity. “I don't remember
+your name,” she said, settling beside him in the buggy.
+
+He told her that he had come to this vicinity after she had gone and
+that he was about to marry her sister.
+
+“The hell you say!” she replied with cheerful surprise. “Who'd thought
+Hannah was old enough to have a fellow!”
+
+They were out of the village now and she produced a paper pack of
+cigarettes from a leather hand bag with a florid gilt top. Flooding her
+being with smoke she gazed with a shudder at the mountain wall on either
+hand, the unbroken greenery sweeping to the sky.
+
+“It's worse than I remembered,” she confided, resting against him. “A
+person with any life to them would go dippy here. Say, it's fierce! And
+yet, inside of me, I'm kind of glad to see it. I used to dream about the
+mountains, and this is like riding in the dream. I'm glad you came for
+me and let me down easy into things. I suppose they live in the kitchen
+home and pa'd lose a currycomb in his beard. Does Hosmer still beller if
+he gets the chicken neck?
+
+“Do you sit in the holy parlor for your courting, and ain't that plush
+sofa a God-forsaken perch for two little love birds? It's funny how I
+remember this and that. I reckon ma's temper don't improve with age.
+They kid me something dreadful about saying 'reckon,' in the talent. But
+it's all good and a dam' sight better than 'I guess.' That's all they
+get off me.”
+
+Calvin Stammark's vague uneasiness changed to an acute dislike, even a
+fear of Phebe. Her freedom of discourse and person, the powdered hard
+fare close to his, the reek of scent--all rasped the delicacy of his
+love for Hannah. The sisters were utterly different, and yet he
+would have realized instantly their relationship. Phebe, too, had the
+disturbing quality that made Hannah so appealing. In the former it was
+coarsened, almost lost; almost but not quite.
+
+“I'll bet,” she continued, “that I'm the only female prodigal on the
+bills. Not that I've been feeding on husks. Not me. Milwaukee lager and
+raw beef sandwiches. I have a passion for them after the show. We do
+two a day and I want solid refreshment. I wonder if you ever saw me. Of
+course you didn't, but you might have. Ned Higmann's Parisian Dainties.
+Rose Rayner's what I go by. That's French, but spelled different, and
+means brightness. And I'm bright, Casper.
+
+“My, what are you so glum about--the dump you live in or matrimony?
+There was a gentleman in an orchestra in Harrisburg wanted to marry
+me--he played the oboe--but I declined. Too Bohemian.... This is where
+we turn,” she cried instinctively, and they swung into the valley where
+the Braleys had their clearing.
+
+Phebe crushed the cigarette in her fingers. Suddenly she was nervous.
+
+“It's natural I have changed a lot,” she said. “If you hear me saying
+anything rough pinch me.”
+
+Richmond Braley was standing beside his house in the muddy clothes
+in which he had labored on the roads, and Mrs. Braley and Hannah came
+eagerly forward. Behind them sounded Susan's racking cough. Sentimental
+tears rolled dustily over Phebe's cheeks as she kissed and embraced her
+mother and sisters.
+
+“H'y,” Richmond Braley awkwardly saluted her; and “H'y,” she answered in
+the local manner.
+
+“Well,” he commented, “you hain't forgotten that anyway.”
+
+Calvin was asked to stay for the supper that had been delayed for
+Phebe's return, but when he declined uncertainly he wasn't pressed.
+Putting up Hosmer's rig and saddling his own horse he rode slowly and
+dejectedly on.
+
+Instead of going directly back to Greenstream he followed the way that
+led to his new house. The evening was silvery with a full brilliant
+moon, and the fresh paint and bright woodwork were striking against the
+dark elevated background of trees. The truck patch would be dug on the
+right, the clearing widen rod by rod. From Alderwith's meadows came the
+soft blowing of a steer's nostrils, while the persistent piping of the
+frogs in the hollows fluctuated in his depressed consciousness.
+
+Calvin had drawn rein and sat on his horse in the road. He was trying to
+picture Hannah standing in the door waiting for him, to hear her calling
+him from work; but always Phebe intervened with her travesty of Hannah's
+clear loveliness.
+
+IV
+
+Again at the Braleys' he found the family--in the kitchen--listening
+with absorbed interest to Phebe's stories of life and the stage.
+Richmond Braley sat with an undisguised wonderment and frequent
+exclamations; there was a faint flush in Mrs. Braley's dun cheeks; Susan
+tried without success to strangle her coughing. Only Hosmer was
+unmoved; at times he nodded in recognition of the realities of Phebe's
+narratives; his attitude was one of complacent understanding.
+
+Calvin, at last succeeding in catching Hannah's attention, made a
+suggestive gesture toward the front of the house, but she ignored his
+desire. She, more than any of the others, was intent upon Phebe. And he
+realized that Phebe paid her a special attention.
+
+“My,” she exclaimed, “the healthy life has put you in the front row. Ned
+Higmann would rave about your shape and airs. It's too bad to bury
+them here in the mountains. I reckon you love me for that”--she turned
+cheerfully to Calvin--“but it's the truth. If you could do anything at
+all, Hannah, you'd lead a chorus and go in the olio. And you would draw
+at the stage door better than you would on the front. Young and fresh as
+a daisy spells champagne and diamond garters. I don't believe they'd let
+you stay in burlesque but sign you for comic opera.”
+
+The blood beat angrily in Calvin Stammark's head. Whatever did Phebe
+mean by talking like that to Hannah just when she was to marry him!
+He cursed silently at Richmond Braley's fatuous face, at Mrs. Braley's
+endorsement of all that her eldest daughter related, at Hosmer's
+assumption of worldly experience. But Hannah's manner filled him with
+apprehension.
+
+“It's according to how you feel,” Phebe continued; “some like to get
+up of a black winter morning and fight the kitchen fire. I don't. Some
+women are happy handing plates to their husband while he puts down a
+square feed. Not in mine.”
+
+“The loneliness is what I hate,” Hannah added.
+
+“It's hell,” the other agreed. “Excuse me, ma.”
+
+Hannah went on: “And you get old without ever seeing things. There
+is all that you tell about going on--those crowds and the jewels and
+dresses, the parties and elegant times; but there is never a whisper
+of it in Greenstream; nothing but the frogs that I could fairly scream
+at--and maybe a church social.” As she talked Hannah avoided Celvin
+Stammark's gaze.
+
+“Me and you'll have a conversation,” Phebe promised her recklessly.
+
+Choking with rage Calvin rose. “I might as well move along,” he
+asserted.
+
+“Don't get heated,” Phebe advised him. “I wouldn't break up your happy
+home, only I want Hannah to have an idea of what's what. I don't doubt
+you'll get her for a wife.”
+
+“There's nothing but slaving for a woman round here,” Mrs. Braley put
+in. “I'm right glad Phebe had so much spirit.”
+
+Richmond Braley evidently thought it was time for certain reservations.
+“You mustn't come down so hard on Calvin and me,” he said practically.
+“We're both likely young fellows.”
+
+“I'll be here evening after to-morrow,” Calvin told Hannah in a low
+voice.
+
+She nodded without interest. They must be married at once, he decided,
+his wise horse following unerringly the rocky road, stepping through
+splashing dark fords. If there was a repetition of the past visit he
+would have something to say. Hannah was his, she was promised to him. He
+felt the coolness of her cheeks, her bright mouth against his. A tyranny
+of misery and desire flooded him at the sudden danger--it was as much as
+that--threatening his happiness and life.
+
+It was a danger founded on his entire ignorance of what he must combat.
+He couldn't visualize it, but it never occurred to him that Hannah would
+actually go away--leave him and Greenstream. No, it was a quality in
+Hannah herself, a thing that had always lurked below the surface, beyond
+his knowledge until now. Yet he realized that it formed a part of her
+appeal, a part of her distinction over the other girls of the county.
+
+Maybe it was because he was never in his heart absolutely certain of
+her--even when she was closest to him she seemed to slip away beyond his
+power to follow. His love, he acknowledged for the first time, had never
+been easy or contented or happy. It had been obscure, like the night
+about him now; it resembled a fire that he held in his bare hands.
+Hannah's particularity, too, was allied to this strange newly-awakened
+peril. In a manner it was that which had carried Phebe out of the
+mountains. Now the resemblance between them was far stronger than their
+difference.
+
+There was more than a touch of all this in the girls' mother, in her
+bitterness and discontent. He felt that he hated the elder as much as he
+did Phebe. If the latter were a man----
+
+He dressed with the greatest care for his next evening with Hannah.
+Hosmer wore no stiffer nor whiter collar, and Calvin's necktie was a
+pure gay silk. He arrived just as the moon detached itself from the
+fringe of mountain peaks and the frogs started insistently. His heart
+was heavy but his manner calm, determined, as he entered the Braley
+kitchen. No one was there but Susan; soon however, Phebe entered in an
+amazing slovenly wrapper with a lace edge turned back from her ample
+throat; and Hannah followed.
+
+Phebe made a mocking reference to the sofa in the parlor, and Hannah's
+expression was distasteful; but she slowly followed Calvin into the
+conventional chamber.
+
+He made no attempt to embrace her, but said instead: “I came to fix the
+day for our wedding.”
+
+“Phebe wants me to go with her for a little first,” she replied
+indirectly. “She says I can come back whenever I like.”
+
+“Your Phebe has no say in it.” He spoke harshly. “We're honestly
+promised to each other and don't need outside advice or interference.”
+
+“Don't you go to call Phebe 'outside,'” she retorted. “She's my sister.
+Perhaps it's a good thing she came when she did, and saved me from being
+buried. Perhaps I'm not aiming to be married right off.”
+
+V
+
+Hannah was standing, a hand on the table that held the pink-shaded lamp,
+and the light showed her petulant and antagonistic. A flare of anger
+threatened to shut all else from Calvin's thoughts; but suddenly he was
+conscious of the necessity for care--care and patience. He forced back
+his justified sense of wrong.
+
+“I wasn't referring direct to Phebe,” he told her. “I meant that between
+us nobody else matters, no one in the world is of any importance to
+me but you. It's all I think about. When I was building the house, our
+house, I hammered you into it with every nail. It is sort of made out of
+you,” he foundered; “like--like I am.”
+
+He could see her relenting in the loss of the rigidity of her pose.
+Hannah's head drooped and her fingers tapped faintly on the table. He
+moved closer, urging his advantage.
+
+“We're all but married, Hannah; our carpet is being wove and that suite
+of furniture ordered through Priest. You've been upset by this talk of
+theaters and such. You'd get tired of them and that fly-by-night life in
+a month.”
+
+“Phebe hasn't.”
+
+“What suits one doesn't suit all,” he said concisely.
+
+“It would suit more girls than you know for,” she informed him. “Take it
+round here, there's nothing to do but get married, and all the change
+is from one kitchen to another. You don't even have a way to match up
+fellows. Soon as you're out of short skirts one of them visits with you
+and the rest stay away like you had the smallpox. Our courting lasted a
+week and you were here four times.”
+
+“We haven't much time, Hannah,” he reminded her. “It was right hard for
+me to see you that often. There was a smart of things you were doing,
+too.”
+
+“The more fool!” she exclaimed.
+
+Again his resentment promised to leap beyond control. He clenched his
+hands and stared with contracted eyes at the floor.
+
+“Well,” he articulated finally, “we're promised anyhow; that can't be
+denied. I have your word.”
+
+“Yes,” she admitted, “but chance that I went with Phebe doesn't mean I'd
+never come back.”
+
+“It would mean that you'd never come back,” he paraphrased her.
+
+“Maybe I would know better,” she answered quickly. “I'm sorry, Calvin.
+I didn't go to be so sharp. Only I don't know what's right,” she went on
+unhappily.
+
+“It isn't what's right,” he corrected her, “but what you want. I wish
+Phebe had stayed away a little longer.”
+
+“There you go again at Phebe!” she protested.
+
+He replied grimly; “Not half what I feel.”
+
+In a dangerously calm voice she inquired, “What's the rest then?”
+
+“She's a trouble-maker,” he asserted in a shaking tone over which he
+seemed to have no command; “she came back to Greenstream and for no
+reason but her own slinked into our happiness. Your whole family--even
+Hosmer, pretending to be so wise--are blind as bats. You can't even
+see that Phebe's hair is as dyed as her stories. She says she is on the
+stage, but it's a pretty stage! I've been to Stanwick and seen those
+Parisian Dainties and burlesque shows. They're nothing but a lot of
+half-naked women cavorting and singing fast songs. And the show only
+begins--with most of them--when the curtain drops. If I even try to
+think of you in that I get sick.”
+
+“Go on,” Hannah stammered, scarcely above her breath.
+
+“It's bad,” Calvin Stammark went on. “The women are bad; and a bad woman
+is something awful. I know about that too. I've been to the city as
+well as Phebe. Oh, Hannah,” he cried, “can't you see, can't you!” With
+a violent effort he regained the greater part of his composure. “But it
+won't touch you,” he added; “we're going to be married right away.”
+
+“We are?” Hannah echoed him thinly, in bitter mockery. “I wouldn't have
+you now if you were the last man on earth with the way you talked about
+Phebe! I don't see how you can stand there and look at me. If I told pa
+or Hosmer they would shoot you. You might as well know this as well--I'm
+going back with her; it'll be some gayer than these lonely old valleys
+or your house stuck away all by itself with nothing to see but Senator
+Alderwith's steers.”
+
+There flashed into Calvin Stammark's mind the memory of how he had
+planned to possess just such cattle for Hannah and himself; he saw in
+the elusive lamplight the house he had built for Hannah. His feeling,
+that a second before had been so acute, was numb. This, he thought, was
+strange; a voice within echoed that he was going to lose her, to lose
+Hannah; but he had no faculty capable of understanding such a calamity.
+
+“Why, Hannah,” he said impotently--“Hannah--” His vision blurred so that
+he couldn't see her clearly; it was as if, indistinct before him,
+she were already fading from his life. “I never went to hurt you,”
+ he continued in a curious detachment from his suffering. “You were
+everything I had.”
+
+Calvin grew awkward, confused in his mind and gestures. At the same time
+Hannah's desirability increased immeasurably. Never in Greenstream or
+any place else had he seen another like her; and he was about to lose
+her, lose Hannah.
+
+Automatically he repeated, “If Phebe were a man----”
+
+He was powerless not only against exterior circumstance but to combat
+what lay with Hannah. Phebe would never set her hands in hot dishwater.
+He recalled their mother, fretful and impatient. He shook his head as
+if to free his mind from so many vain thoughts. She stood, hard and
+unrelenting.
+
+He tried to mutter a phrase about being here if she should return, but
+it perished in the conviction of its uselessness. Calvin saw her with
+green-yellow hair, a cigarette in painted lips; he heard the blurred
+applause of men at the spectacle of Hannah on the stage, dressed like
+the women he had seen there. Then pride stiffened him into a semblance
+of her own remoteness.
+
+“It's in you,” he said; “and it will have to come out. I'm what I am
+too, and that doesn't make it any easier. Kind of a fool about you.
+Another girl won't do. I'll say good night.”
+
+He turned and abruptly quitted the room and all his hope.
+
+VI
+
+When the furniture Calvin had ordered through the catalogue at Priest's
+store arrived by mountain wagon he placed it in the room beside the
+kitchen that was to have been Hannah's and his. Hannah had gone three
+weeks before with Phebe. This done he sat for a long while on the
+portico of his house, facing the rich bottom pasturage and high verdant
+range beyond. It was late afternoon and the rift was filling with a
+golden haze from a sun veiled in watery late-spring vapors. An old apple
+tree by the road was flushed with pink blossoms and a mocking bird was
+whistling with piercing sweetness.
+
+Soon it would be evening and the frogs would begin again, the frogs
+and whippoorwills. The valley, just as Hannah had said, was lonely.
+He stirred and later found himself some supper--in the kitchen where
+everything was new.
+
+On the following morning he left the Greenstream settlement; it
+was Friday, and Monday he returned with Ettie, his sister. She was
+remarkably like him--tall and angular, with a gaunt face and steady blue
+eyes. Older than Calvin, she had settled into a complete acquiescence
+with whatever life brought; no more for her than the keeping of her
+brother's house. Calvin, noting the efficient manner in which she
+ordered their material affairs, wondered at the fact that she had not
+been married. Men were unaccountable, but none more than himself, with
+his unquenchable longing for Hannah.
+
+This retreated to the back of his being. He never spoke of her. Indeed
+he tried to put her from his thoughts, and with a measure of success.
+But it never occurred to him to consider any other girl; that
+possibility was closed. Those he saw--and they were uniformly kind, even
+inviting--were dull after Hannah.
+
+Instead he devoted himself to the equivalent, in his undertakings,
+of Ettie's quiet capability. The following year a small number of the
+steers grazing beyond the road were his; in two years more Senator
+Alderwith died, and there was a division of his estate, in which Calvin
+assumed large liabilities, paying them as he had contracted. The timber
+in Sugarloaf Valley drew speculators--he sold options and bought a place
+in the logging development.
+
+It seemed to him that he grew older, in appearance anyhow, with
+exceptional rapidity; his face grew leaner and his beard, which he
+continued to shave, was soiled with gray hair.
+
+He avoided the Braleys and their clearing; and when circumstance drew
+him into conversation with Richmond or Hosmer he studiously spoke of
+indifferent things. He heard nothing of Hannah. Yet he learned in the
+various channels of communication common to remote localities that
+Richmond Braley was doing badly. Hosmer went to bank in one of the
+newly prosperous towns of West Virginia and apparently left all
+family obligations behind; Susan died of lung fever; and then, at the
+post-office, Calvin was told that Richmond himself was dangerously sick.
+
+He left the mail with Ettie at his door and rode on, turning for the
+first time in nine years into the narrow valley of the Braleys' home.
+The place had been neglected until it was hardly distinguishable from
+the surrounding tangled wild. Such sheep as he saw were in wretched
+condition, wild and massed with filth and burrs.
+
+Mrs. Braley was filling a large glass flask with hot water for her
+husband; and to Calvin's surprise a child with a quantity of straight
+pale-brown hair and wide-opened hazel-brown eyes was seated in the
+kitchen watching her.
+
+“How is Richmond?” he asked, his gaze straying involuntarily to the
+girl.
+
+“Kingdom Come's how he is,” Lucy Braley replied. “Yes, and the poorhouse
+will end us unless Hosmer has a spark of good feeling. I sent him
+a postal card to come a long while back, but he hasn't so much as
+answered. Here, Lucy”--she turned to the child--“run up with this.”
+
+“Lucy?” Calvin Stammark asked when they were alone.
+
+“Been here two weeks,” Mrs. Braley told him. “What will become of her's
+beyond me. She is Hannah's daughter, and Hannah is dead.”
+
+There was a sharp constriction of Calvin's heart. Hannah's daughter, and
+Hannah was dead!
+
+“As far as I know,” the other continued in a strained metallic voice,
+“the child's got no father you could fix. Her mother wrote the name was
+Lucy Vibard, and she'd called her after me. But when I asked her she
+didn't seem to know anything about it.
+
+“Hannah was alone and dog poor when she died, that's certain. Like
+everything else I can lay mind on she came to a bad end--Lord reckons
+where Phebe is. I always thought you were weak fingered to let Hannah
+go--with that house built and all. I suppose maybe you weren't, though;
+well out of a slack bargain.”
+
+Calvin Stammark scarcely heard her; his being was possessed by the
+pitiable image of Hannah dying alone and dog poor. He had always
+pictured her--except in the fleet vision of debasement--as young and
+graceful and disturbing. Without further speech he left the kitchen and
+crossed the house to the shut parlor. It was screened against the day,
+dim and musty and damp. The orange plush of the chairs and the narrow
+uncomfortable sofa, carefully dusted, was as bright as it had been when
+he had last seen it--was it ten years ago?
+
+Here she had stood, her fingers tapping on the table, when he had made
+the unfortunate remark about Phebe; the lamplight had illuminated her
+right cheek. Here she had proclaimed her impatience with Greenstream,
+with its loneliness, her hunger for life. Here he had lost her. A
+sudden need to see Hannah's daughter invaded him and he returned to the
+kitchen.
+
+The child was present, silent; she had Hannah's eyes, Hannah's hair.
+Seated by Richmond Braley's bed he realized instantly that the old man
+was dying; and mentally he composed the urgent message to be sent to
+Hosmer. But that failed to settle the problem of Lucy's safety--Hannah's
+Lucy, who might have been his too. The solution of that difficulty
+slowly took form in his thoughts. There was no need to discuss it with
+Ettie--his duty, yes, and his desire was clear.
+
+He took her home directly after Richmond's funeral, an erratic wind
+blowing her soft loose hair against his face as he drove.
+
+VII
+
+There had been additions to Calvin Stammark's house--the half story
+raised, and the length increased by a room. This was now furnished as
+the parlor and had an entrance from the porch extended across the face
+of the dwelling; the middle lower room was his; the chamber designed
+for his married life was a seldom used dining room; while Ettie and Lucy
+were above. A number of sheds for stabling and implements, chicken coops
+and pig pen had accumulated at the back; the corn and buckwheat climbed
+the mountain; and the truck patch was wide and luxuriant.
+
+A narrow strip, bright, in season, with the petunias and cinnamon pinks
+which Ettie tended, separated the dwelling from the public road; and
+the flowers more than anything else attracted Hannah's daughter. Calvin
+talked with her infrequently, but a great deal of his silent attention
+was directed at the child.
+
+Already Lucy had a quality of appeal to which he watched Ettie respond.
+The latter took a special pride in making Lucy as pretty as possible;
+in the afternoon she would dress her in sheer white with a ribbon in
+her hair. She spared Lucy many of the details of housework in which the
+latter could have easily assisted her; and when Calvin protested she
+replied that she was so accustomed to doing that it was easier for her
+to go ahead.
+
+Calvin's feelings were mixed. At first he had told himself that Lucy
+would be, in a way, his daughter; he would bring her up as his own;
+and in the end what he had would be hers, just as it should have been
+Hannah's. However, his attitude was never any that might be recognized
+as that of parenthood. He never grew completely accustomed to her
+presence, she was always a subject of interest and speculation. He
+continued to get pleasure from her slender graceful being and the little
+airs of delicacy she assumed.
+
+He was conscious, certainly, that Lucy was growing older--yet not so
+fast as he--but he had a shock of surprise when she informed him that
+she was fifteen. Calvin pinched her cheek, and, sitting on the porch,
+heard her within issuing a peremptory direction to Ettie. The elder made
+no reply and, he knew, did as Lucy wished. This disturbed him. There
+wasn't a finer woman living than Ettie Stammark, and he didn't purpose
+to have Lucy impudent to her. Lucy, he decided, was getting a little
+beyond them. She was quick at her lessons, the Greenstream teacher said.
+Lucy would have considerable property when he died; he'd like her to
+have all the advantages possible; and--very suddenly--Calvin decided to
+send her away to school, to Stanwick, the small city to and from which
+the Greenstream stage drove.
+
+She returned from her first term at Christmas, full of her experiences
+with teachers and friends, to which Ettie and he listened with absorbed
+attention. Now she seemed farther from him than before; and he saw that
+a likeness to Hannah was increasing; not in appearance--though that
+was not dissimilar--but in the quality that had established Hannah's
+difference from other girls, the quality for which he had never found
+a name. The assumptions of Lucy's childhood had become strongly marked
+preferences for the flowers of existence, the ease of the portico rather
+than the homely labor of the back of the house.
+
+Neither his sister nor he resented this or felt that Lucy was evading
+her just duties; rather they enjoyed its difference from their own
+practical beings and affairs. They could afford to have her in fresh
+laundered frills and they secretly enjoyed the manner in which she
+instructed them in social conventions.
+
+At her home-coming for the summer she brought to an end the meals in the
+kitchen; but when she left once more for Stanwick and school Ettie and
+Calvin without remark drifted back to the comfortable convenience of the
+table near the cooking stove.
+
+This period of Lucy's experience at an end she arrived in Greenstream on
+a hot still June evening. Neither Calvin nor his sister had been able to
+go to Stanwick for the school commencement, and Calvin had been too late
+to meet the stage. After the refreshing cold water in the bright tin
+basin by the kitchen door he went to his room for a presentable necktie
+and handkerchief--Lucy was very severe about the latter--and then walked
+into the dining room.
+
+The lamp was not yet lit, the light was elusive, tender, and his heart
+contracted violently at the youthful yet mature back toward him. She
+turned slowly, a hand resting on the table, and Calvin Stammark's senses
+swam. An inner confusion invaded him, pierced by a sharp unutterable
+longing.
+
+“Hannah,” he whispered.
+
+She smiled and advanced; but, his heart pounding, Calvin retreated. He
+must say something reasonable, tell her that they were glad to have her
+back--mustn't leave them again. She kissed him, and, his eyes shut, the
+touch of her lips re-created about him the parlor of the Braleys,--the
+stiffly arranged furniture with its gay plush, the varnished fretwork of
+the organ, the pink glow of the lamp.
+
+She was Hannah! The resemblance was so perfect--her cheek's turn,
+her voice, sweet with a trace of petulance, her fingers--that it was
+sustained in a flooding illumination through the commonplace revealing
+act of supper. It was as if the eighteen years since Hannah, his Hannah,
+was a reality were but momentary, the passage of the valley. His love
+for her was unchanged--no, here at least, was a difference; it was
+greater, keener; exactly as if during the progress of their intimacy he
+had been obliged to go away from her for a while.
+
+She accompanied Ettie to the kitchen and Calvin sat on the porch in
+a gathering darkness throbbing with frogs and perfumed with drifting
+locust blooms. Constellation by constellation the stars glimmered into
+being. Hannah, Lucy! They mingled and in his fiber were forever one. He
+gave himself up to the beauty of his passion, purified and intense from
+long patience and wanting, amazed at the miracle that had brought back
+everything infinitely desirable.
+
+He forgot his age, and, preparing for the night, saw with a sense of
+personal outrage his seamed countenance reflected in the mirror of the
+bureau. Yet in reality he wasn't old--forty-something--still, not fifty.
+He was as hard and nearly as springy as a hickory sapling. There was
+a saying in which he found vast comfort--the prime, the very prime of
+life.
+
+VIII
+
+His enormous difficulty would be to bring Lucy to the understanding
+of his new--but it was the old--attitude toward her. If she had never
+become completely familiar to him association had made him a solid
+recognized part of her existence; if not exactly a father, an uncle at
+the very least. Calvin realized that she would be profoundly shocked
+by any abrupt revelation of his feeling. Yet he was for the time in no
+hurry to bring about the desired change in their relationship. His
+life had been so long empty that it was enough to dwell on the great
+happiness of his repossession.
+
+This, he knew, could not continue, but at present, today, it was almost
+enough. Before he was aware, the summer had gone, the mountains were
+sheeted in gold; and he was still dreaming, putting off the actuality
+before them.
+
+The logging in Sugarloaf Valley had grown to an operation of importance,
+and a great deal of his time was spent watching the spur of railroad
+creep forward and the clearing of new sections; sawmills and camps were
+in course of erection; and what had been a still green cleft in the
+mountains was filled with human activity. He had secured an advantageous
+position for a young man from the part of the county inhabited by the
+Stammark family, Wilmer Deakon, and consulted with him frequently in
+connection with his interests.
+
+Wilmer was to the last degree dependable; a large grave individual who
+took a serious interest in the welfare of his fellows and supported
+established customs and institutions. He sang in a resounding barytone
+with the Methodist Church choir; his dignified bearing gave weight to
+the school board; and he accumulated a steadily growing capital at the
+Greenstream bank. An admirable individual, Calvin thought, and extended
+to him the wide hospitality of his house.
+
+Lucy apparently had little to say to Wilmer Deakon; indeed, when he
+was not present, to their great amusement she imitated his deliberate
+balanced speech. She said that he was too solemn--an opinion with which
+Calvin privately agreed--and made an irreverent play on his name and the
+place he should occupy in the church. It seemed that she found a special
+pleasure in annoying him; and on an occasion when Calvin had determined
+to reprove her for this he was surprised by Winner's request to speak to
+him outside.
+
+Wilmer Deakon said abruptly: “Lucy and I are promised to each other.”
+
+Calvin stood gazing at him in a lowering complete surprise, at a loss
+for words, when the other continued with an intimation of his peculiar
+qualifications for matrimony, the incontrovertible fact that he could
+and would take care of Lucy. He stopped at the appropriate moment and
+waited confidently for Calvin Stammark's approval.
+
+The latter, out of a gathering immeasurable rage, almost shouted: “You
+get to hell off my place!”
+
+Wilmer Deakon was astounded but otherwise unshaken. “That's no way to
+answer a decent man and a proper question,” he replied. “Lucy and I want
+to be married. There's nothing wrong with that. But you look as if I had
+offered to disgrace her. Why, Mr. Stammark, you can't keep her forever.
+I reckon it'll be hard on you to have her go, but you must make up your
+mind to it some day. She's willing, and you know all about me. Then Lucy
+won't be far away from you all. I've cleared the brush up and right now
+the bottom of our house is laid in Sugarloaf.”
+
+Calvin's anger sank before a sense of helplessness at this latter fact.
+Wilmer was building a house for her just as he had built one for Hannah.
+He remembered his delight and pride as it had approached completion; he
+remembered the evening, nearly twenty years ago, when he had sat on the
+bank across the road and seen it finished. Then he had ridden, without
+waiting to fix up, to the Braleys'; Hannah had scolded him as they sat
+in the parlor.
+
+“I must talk to Lucy,” he said in a different weary tone. Bareheaded he
+walked over into the pasture, now his. The cattle moved vaguely in the
+gloom, with softly blowing nostrils, and the streams were like smooth
+dark ribbons. When he returned to his house the lights were out, Wilmer
+Deakon was gone and Lucy was in bed.
+
+He again examined his countenance in the mirror, but now he was
+surprised that it was not haggard with age. It seemed that twenty more
+years had been added to him since supper. He wondered whether there had
+ever been another man who had lost his love twice and saw that he had
+been a blind fool for not speaking in the June dusk when Lucy had come
+back from school.
+
+Lucy, it developed, had spoken to Ettie, and there was a general
+discussion of her affair at breakfast.
+
+Calvin carried away from it a persistent feeling of dissatisfaction,
+but for this he could find no tangible reason. Of course, he silently
+argued, the girl could not be expected to show her love for Wilmer
+publicly; it was enough that he had been assured of its strength; the
+fact of her agreement to marry him was final.
+
+He went about his daily activities with a heavy absent-mindedness, with
+a dragging spirit. A man was coming from Washington to see him in the
+interest of a new practically permanent fencing, and he met him at
+the post-office, listened to a loud cheerful greeting with marked
+inattention.
+
+The salesman was named Martin Eckles, and he was fashionably dressed in
+a suit of shepherd's check bound with braid, and had a flashing ring--a
+broad gold band set with a mystic symbol in rubies and diamonds. After
+his supper at the hotel he walked, following Calvin's direction, the
+short distance to the latter's house, where Calvin and Ettie Stammark
+and Lucy were seated on the porch.
+
+Martin Eckles, it developed, was a fluent and persuasive talker, a man
+of the broadest worldly experiences and wit. He was younger than Calvin,
+but older than Wilmer Deakon, and a little fat. He had a small mustache
+cut above his lip, and closely shaved ruddy cheeks with a tinge of
+purple about his ears. Drawing out his monologue entertainingly he gazed
+repeatedly at Lucy. Calvin lost the sense of most that the other said;
+he was immersed in the past that had been made the present and then
+denied to him--it was all before him in the presence of Lucy, of Hannah
+come back with the unforgetable and magic danger of her appeal.
+
+IX
+
+In the extension of his commercial activity Martin Eckles kept his
+room at the Greenstream hotel and employed a horse and buggy for his
+excursions throughout the county. It had become his habit to sit through
+the evenings with the Stammarks where his flood of conversation never
+lessened. Lucy scarcely added a phrase to the sum of talk. She rocked in
+her chair with a slight endless motion, her dreaming gaze fixed on the
+dim valley.
+
+Wilmer Deakon, on the occasion of his first encounter with Eckles at the
+Stammarks', acknowledged the other's phrase and stood waiting for Lucy
+to proceed with him to the parlor. But Lucy was apparently unaware of
+this; she sat calm and remote in her crisp white skirts, while Wilmer
+fidgeted at the door.
+
+Soon, however, she said: “For goodness' sake, Wilmer, whatever's the
+matter with you? Can't you find a chair that suits you? You make a
+person nervous.”
+
+At the same time she rose ungraciously and followed him into the house.
+
+Wilmer came out, Calvin thought, in an astonishingly short time.
+Courting was nothing like it had been in his day. The young man
+muttered an unintelligible sentence that, from its connection, might be
+interpreted as a good night, and strode back to the barn and his horse.
+
+Martin Eckles smiled: “The love birds must have been a little ruffled.”
+
+And Calvin, with a strong impression of having heard such a thing
+before, was vaguely uneasy. Eckles sat for a long space; Lucy didn't
+appear, and at last the visitor rose reluctantly. But Lucy had not gone
+to bed; she came out on the porch and dropped with a flounce into a
+chair beside Calvin.
+
+“Wilmer's pestering me to get married right away,” she told him; “before
+ever the house is built. He seems to think I ought to be just crazy to
+take him and go to that lonely Sugarloaf place.”
+
+“It's what you promised for,” Calvin reminded her; “nothing's turned up
+you didn't know about.”
+
+“If I did!” she exclaimed irritably. “What else is a girl to do, I'd
+like to ask? It's just going from one stove to another, here. Only it'll
+be worse in my case--you and Aunt Ettie have been lovely to me. I hate
+to cook!” she cried. “And it makes me sick to put my hands in greasy
+dishwater! I suppose that's wicked but I can't help it. When I told
+Wilmer that to-night he acted like I'd denied communion. I can't help it
+if the whippoorwills make me shiver, can I? Or if I want to see a person
+go by once in a while. I--I don't want to be bad--or to hurt you or
+Wilmer. Oh, I'll settle down, there's nothing else to do; I'll marry him
+and get old before my time, like the others.”
+
+Calvin Stammark leaned forward, his hands on his knees, and stared at
+her in shocked amazement--Hannah in every accent and feeling. The old
+sense of danger and helplessness flooded him. He thought of Phebe with
+her dyed hair and cigarette-stained lips, her stories of the stage and
+life; he thought of Hannah dying alone and dog poor. Now Lucy----
+
+“Do you remember anything about your mother,” he asked, “and before you
+came here?”
+
+“Only that we were dreadfully unhappy,” she replied. “There was a
+boarding house with actresses washing their stockings in the rooms and
+a landlady they were all afraid of. There was beer in the wash-stand
+pitcher. But that wouldn't happen to me,” she asserted; “I'd be
+different. I might be an actress, but in dramas where my hair would be
+down and everybody love me.”
+
+“You're going to marry Wilmer Deakon and be a proper happy wife!”
+ he declared, bringing his fist down on a hard palm. “Get this other
+nonsense out of your head!”
+
+Suddenly he was trembling at the old catastrophe reopened by Lucy. His
+love for her, and his dread, choked him. She added nothing more, but
+sat rigid and pale and rebellious. Before long she went in, but Calvin
+stayed facing the darkness, the menace of the lonely valley. Except for
+the lumbermen it would be worse in the Sugarloaf cutting.
+
+Damn the frogs!
+
+Martin Eckles appeared in the buggy the following evening and offered
+to carry Lucy for a short drive to a near-by farm; with an air of
+indifference she accepted. Wilmer didn't call, and Calvin sat in silent
+perplexity with Ettie. The buggy returned later than they had allowed,
+and Lucy went up to bed without stopping on the porch.
+
+The next morning Ettie, with something in her hand, came out to Calvin
+at the stable shed.
+
+“I found this in Lucy's room,” she said simply.
+
+It was Martin Eckles' gold ring, set with the insignia in rubies,
+suspended in a loop of ribbon.
+
+A cold angry certitude formed in his being. What a criminal fool he had
+been! What a blind booby! His only remark, however, brought a puzzled
+expression to Ettie's troubled countenance. Calvin Stammark exclaimed,
+“Phebe Braley.” He was silent for a little, his frowning gaze fixed
+beyond any visible object, then he added: “Put that back where you found
+it and forget everything.”
+
+Ettie laid a hand on his sleeve. “Now, Calvin,” she begged, her voice
+low and strained, “promise me----”
+
+“Forget everything!” he repeated harshly.
+
+His face was dark, forbidding, the lines deeply bitten about a somber
+mouth, his eyes were like blue ice. He walked into Greenstream, where he
+saw the proprietor of the small single hotel; then, back in his room, he
+unwrapped from oiled leather a heavy blued revolver; and soon after he
+saddled his horse and was clattering in a sharp trot in the opposite
+direction from the village.
+
+It was dark when, having returned, he dismounted and swung the saddle
+from the horse to its tree. Familiar details kept him a long while, his
+hands were steady but slow, automatic in movement. He went in through
+the kitchen past Ettie to his room, and after a little he re-wrapped the
+revolver and laid it back in its accustomed place. Supper, in spite of
+Lucy's sharp comment, was set by the stove, and Ettie was solicitous
+of his every possible need. He ate methodically what was offered, and
+afterward filled and lit his pipe. It soon went out. Once, on the porch,
+he leaned toward Lucy and awkwardly touched her shoulder.
+
+X
+
+Wilmer came. He was late, and Lucy said wearily, “I've got a headache
+to-night. Do you mind if we stay out here in the cool?”
+
+He didn't, and his confident familiar planning took the place of Martin
+Eckles' more exciting narratives.
+
+The next day, past noon, the proprietor of the Greenstream hotel left
+an excited group of men to stop Calvin as he drove in from Sugarloaf
+Valley.
+
+He cried: “Eckles has been shot and killed. First they found the horse
+and buggy by the road, and then Martin Eckles. He had fallen out. One
+bullet did it.”
+
+“That's too bad,” Calvin replied evenly. “Lawlessness ought to be put
+down.” He had known Solon Entreken all his life. The level gaze of two
+men encountered and held.
+
+Then: “I'll never say anything against that,” the other pronounced.
+“It's mighty strange who could have shot Eckles and got clear away.
+That's what he did, in spite of hell and the sheriff.”
+
+Turning, after inevitable exclamations, toward home, Calvin found Lucy
+sitting moodily on the porch.
+
+“I've got a right ugly piece of news,” he told her, masking the painful
+interest with which he followed her expression. “Martin Eckles was
+killed yesterday; shot out of the buggy.”
+
+She grew pale, her breast rose in a sudden gasp and her hands were
+clenched.
+
+“Oh!” she whispered, horrified.
+
+But there was nothing in her manner beyond the natural detestation of
+such brutality; nothing, he saw, hidden.
+
+“He wanted me to go away with him,” she swept on; “and get married in
+Stanwick. Martin wanted me to see the world. He said I ought to, and not
+stay here all my life.”
+
+The misery that settled over her, the hopelessness dulling her youth
+filled him with a passionate resentment at the fate that made her what
+she was and seemingly condemned her to eternal denial. His love for
+her--Lucy, Hannah, Hannah, Lucy--was intolerably keen. He went to her,
+bending with a riven hand on the arm of her chair.
+
+“Do you want Wilmer?” he demanded. “Do you love him truly? Is he
+enough?”
+
+“I don't know.” Slow tears wet her cheeks. “I can't say. I ought to;
+he's good and faithful, and with some of me that's enough. But there's
+another part; I can't explain it except to say it's a kind of excitement
+for the life Mr. Eckles told us about, all those lights and restaurants
+and theaters. Sometimes I think I'll die, I want it so much; then it
+comes over me how ungrateful I am to you and Aunt Ettie, and I hate
+myself for the way I treat Wilmer.”
+
+“Do you love him?” he insisted.
+
+“Perhaps not like you mean.”
+
+All that had been so long obscured in his mind and heart slowly cleared
+to understanding--Lucy Braley, Richmond's wife; Phebe; Hannah; and again
+Lucy, Lucy Vibard had this common hunger for life, for brightness; they
+were as helpless in its grasp as he had been to hold Hannah. Phebe's
+return, Martin Eckles--were only incidents in a great inner need. In
+itself it wasn't wicked; circumstance had made it seem wrong; Phebe's
+greenish hair, the mark of so much spoiled, Hannah's unhappy death--were
+the result of aspirations; they fretted and bruised, even killed
+themselves, like gay young animals, innocent animals, in a dark lonely
+enclosure.
+
+They were really finer than the satisfied women who faded to ugliness
+in the solitary homes of the Greenstream mountains; not better, for
+example, than Ettie--it might be that they weren't so good, not so high
+in heaven; but they were finer in the manner of blooded horses rebelling
+against the plow traces. They were more elegant, slimmer, with a greater
+fire. That too was the secret of their memorable power over him; he
+wanted a companion different from a kitchen drudge; when he returned
+home at evening, he wanted a wife cool and sweet in crisp white with
+a yellow ribbon about her waist, and store slippers. He loved Lucy's
+superiority--it was above ordinary things. “Like a star,” Calvin
+Stammark told himself.
+
+He, with everything else that had combated their desire, depriving them
+of the very necessities for his adoration, had been to blame.
+
+“Lucy,” he said, bending over her and speaking rapidly, “let's you and
+me go and learn all this life together. Let's run away from Greenstream
+and Wilmer Deakon and even Ettie, what we ought to hold by, and see
+every theater in the country. I've got enough money----”
+
+The radiance of the gesture by which she interrupted his speech filled
+him with pounding joy.
+
+“Oh, shall we!” she cried; and then hugged him wildly, her warm young
+arms about his neck.
+
+“Of course we will,” he reassured her; “and right away, to-morrow. You
+and me.”
+
+He felt her lips against his, and then more cautiously she took up the
+immediate planning of their purpose. It would be ridiculously easy; they
+would drive to Stanwick in the buggy.
+
+“The hotels and all,” she continued with shining eyes; “and nobody will
+think it's queer. I'll be your daughter, like always.”
+
+Calvin turned abruptly from her and faced the valley saturated with
+slumberous sunlight. Lucy hesitated for a moment and then fled lightly
+into the house. After a little he heard her singing on the upper floor.
+People wouldn't think it was queer because she would be his daughter,
+“like always.”
+
+Yet he wasn't old beyond hope, past love--as strong and nearly as
+springy as a hickory sapling. He had waited half his life for this.
+Calvin slowly smiled in bitterness and self-contempt; a pretty figure
+for a young girl to admire, he thought, losing the sense of mere
+physical fitness. Anyhow Lucy was supremely happy and safe, and he
+had accomplished it. He was glad that he had been so industrious and
+successful. Lucy could have almost anything she wanted--pretty clothes
+and rings with real jewels, necklaces hung with better than Scotch
+pebbles.
+
+Perhaps when she had seen the world--its bigness and noise and
+confusion--after her longing was answered, she would turn back to him.
+Already he was oppressed by a feeling of strangeness, of loss at leaving
+the high valleys of home.
+
+
+
+
+THE EGYPTIAN CHARIOT
+
+
+Lemuel Doret walked slowly home from the prayer meeting with his being
+vibrating to the triumphant beat of the last hymn. It was a good hymn,
+filled with promised joy for every one who conquered sin. The long
+twilight of early summer showed the surrounding fields still bright
+green, but the more distant hills were vague, the sky was remote and
+faintly blue, and shadows thickened under the heavy maples that covered
+the single street of Nantbrook. The small frame dwellings of the village
+were higher than the precarious sidewalk; flights of steps mounted to
+the narrow porches; and though Lemuel Doret realized that his neighbors
+were sitting outside he did not look up, and no voices called down
+arresting his deliberate progress.
+
+An instant bitterness, tightening his thin metallic lips and narrowing a
+cold fixed gaze, destroyed the harmony of the assured salvation. Lemuel
+Doret silently cursed the pinched stupidity of the country clods. The
+slow helpless fools! If instead of muttering in groups one of the men
+would face him with the local hypocrisy he'd sink a heel in his jaw. The
+bitterness expanded into a hatred like the gleam on a knife blade;
+his hands, spare and hard, grew rigid with the desire to choke a thick
+throat.
+
+Then the rage sank before a swift self-horror, an overwhelming
+conviction of his relapse into unutterable sin. He stopped and in a
+spiritual agony, forgetful of his surroundings, half lifted quivering
+arms to the dim sky: “O Christ, lean down from the throne and hold me
+steady.”
+
+He stood for a moment while a monotonous chatter on a porch above
+dropped to a curious stillness. It seemed to him that his whisper was
+heard and immediately answered; anyhow peace slowly enveloped him
+once more, the melody of hope was again uppermost in his mind. He went
+forward, procuring a cigarette from a mended ragged pocket.
+
+His house, reached by a short steep path and sagging steps, was dark;
+at first he saw no one, then the creak of a rocking-chair in the open
+doorway indicated Bella, his wife.
+
+“Give me a cigarette,” she demanded, her penetrating voice dissatisfied.
+
+“You know I don't want you to smoke anywhere you can be seen,” he
+answered. “Since we've come here to live we have to mind the customs.
+The women'll never take to you smoking cigarettes.”
+
+“Ah, hell, what do I care! We came here, but it ain't living. It makes
+me sick, and you make me sick I Can't you sing and pray in the city as
+well as among these hicks?”
+
+“I'm afraid of it,” he said, brief and somber. “And I don't want
+Flavilla brought up with any of the gang we knew. Where is she?”
+
+“I sent her to bed. She fussed round till she got me nervous.”
+
+“Did she feel good?”
+
+“If she didn't a smack would have cured her.”
+
+He passed Bella, rocking sharply, into the dank interior.
+
+On the right was the bare room where he had his dilapidated barber's
+chair and shelf with a few mugs, brushes and other scant necessities.
+There had been no customers to-day nor yesterday; still, it was the
+middle of the week and what trade there was generally concentrated on
+Saturday. Beyond he went upstairs to Flavilla's bed. She was awake,
+twisting about in a fragmentary nightgown, dark against the disordered
+sheet.
+
+“It's dreadful hot,” she complained shortly; “my head's hot too. The
+window won't go up.”
+
+Lemuel Doret crossed the narrow bare floor and dragged the sash open;
+then he moved his daughter while he smoothed the bed and freshened a
+harsh pillow. She whimpered.
+
+“You're too big to cry without any reason,” he informed her, leaving to
+fetch a glass of water from the tap in the kitchen.
+
+Usually she responded to his intimations of her increasing age and
+wisdom, but to-night she was listless. She turned away from him, her
+arms flung above her head and wispy hair veiling her damp cheek.
+
+“Keep still, can't you?” and he gathered her hair into a clumsy plait.
+
+The darkness about him seeped within, into his hope and courage and
+resolution; all that he had determined to do seemed impossibly removed.
+The whole world resembled Nantbrook--a place of universal condemnation,
+forgiving nothing. He felt a certainty that even the few dollars he had
+honestly earned would now be stopped.
+
+The air grew clearer and deeper in color, and stars brightened. Lemuel
+Doret wondered about God. There was no doubt of His power and glory or
+of the final triumph of heaven established and earth, sin, destroyed.
+ wickedness was equally plain; it was the ways of the righteous that
+bewildered him--the conduct of the righteous and, in the face of his
+supreme recognition, the extreme difficulty of providing life for
+Flavilla--and Bella.
+
+He consciously added his wife's name. Somehow his daughter was the sole
+objective measure of his determination to build up, however late, a home
+here and in eternity.
+
+It was not unreasonable, in view of the past, to suppose that he had no
+chance of succeeding. Yet religion was explicit upon that particular; it
+was founded on the very hopes of sinners, on redemption. But he could do
+nothing without an opportunity to make the small living they required;
+if the men of Nantbrook, of the world, wouldn't come to him to be
+barbered, and if he had no money to go anywhere else to begin again,
+he was helpless. Everything was conspiring to thrust him back into the
+city, of which he had confessed his fear, back----
+
+He rose and stood above the child's thin exposed body--suddenly frozen
+into a deathlike sleep--chilled with a vision, a premonition, the
+insidious possibility of surrender. He saw, too, that it was a solitary
+struggle; even his devotion to Flavilla, shut in the single space of
+his own heart, helped to isolate him in what resembled a surrounding
+blackness rent with blinding flashes of lightning.
+
+The morning sun showed him spare, with a curious appearance of being
+both wasted and grimly strong; he moved with an alert, a watchful ease,
+catlike and silent; and his face was pallid with gray shadows. He stood
+in trousers and undershirt, suspenders hanging down, before the small
+dim mirror in the room where he had the barber chair, pasting his hair
+down with an odorous brilliantine. This was his intention, but he saw
+with sharp discomfort that bristling strands defied his every effort.
+The hot edge of anger cut at him, but, singing, he dissipated it:
+
+  “_Why should I feel discouraged?
+    Why should the shadows fall?
+  Why should my heart be lonely,
+    And long for heaven_----”
+
+He broke off at the thought of Flavilla, still in bed, her head, if
+anything, hotter than last night. Lemuel Doret wished again that he had
+not allowed Bella to call their child by that unsanctified name.
+Before the birth they had seen a vaudeville, and Bella, fascinated by a
+golden-and-white creature playing a white accordion that bore her
+name in ornamental letters, had insisted on calling her daughter,
+too, Flavilla. In spite of the hymn, dejection fastened on him as he
+remembered this and a great deal more about his wife.
+
+If she could only be brought to see the light their marriage and
+life might still be crowned with triumph. But Bella, pointing out the
+resulting poverty of his own conviction and struggle, said freely that
+she had no confidence in promises; she demanded fulfillment now. She
+regarded him as more than a little affected in the brain. Yet there had
+been no deep change in him--from the very first he had felt a growing
+uneasiness at the spectacle of the world and the flesh. The throb of
+the Salvation Army drum at the end of an alley, the echo of the fervent
+exhortations and holy songs, had always filled him with a surging
+emotion like homesickness.
+
+Two impulses, he recognized, held a relentless warfare within him; he
+pictured them as Christ and Satan; but the first would overthrow all
+else. “Glory!” he cried mechanically aloud. He put down the hairbrush
+and inspected the razors on their shelf. The bright morning light
+flashed along the rubbed fine blades; they were beautiful, flawless,
+without a trace of defilement. He felt the satin smoothness of the steel
+with an actual thrill of pleasure; his eyes narrowed until they were
+like the glittering points of knives; he held the razor firmly and
+easily, with a sinewy poised wrist.
+
+Finally, his suspenders in position over a collarless striped shirt, he
+moved out to the bare sharp descent before his house and poured water
+onto the roots of a struggling lilac bush. Its leaves were now coated
+with dust; but the week before it had borne an actual cluster of scented
+blossom; and he was still in the wonder of the lavender fragrance on the
+meager starved stem.
+
+The beat of hoofs approached, and he turned, seeing Doctor Frazee in his
+yellow cart.
+
+“Oh, doctor!” he called instinctively.
+
+The other stopped, a man with a lean face, heavy curved nose and
+penetrating gaze behind large spectacles. He was in reality a
+veterinary, but Lemuel Doret, out of a profound caution, had discovered
+him to be above the narrow scope of local prejudice.
+
+“I wish you'd look at Flavilla,” Doret continued.
+
+The doctor hesitated, and then turned shortly in at the sidewalk.
+“It will hurt no one if I do that.” Above Flavilla's flushed face, a
+tentative finger on her wrist, Frazee's expression grew serious. “I'll
+tell you this,” he asserted; “she's sick. You had better call Markley
+to-day. And until he comes don't give her any solids. You can see she's
+in a fever.”
+
+“Can't you tend her? I'd put more on you than any fresh young hospital
+stiff.”
+
+“Certainly not,” he responded.
+
+When the latter had gone Lemuel Doret found his wife in the kitchen. She
+wore a pale-blue wrapper with a soiled scrap of coarse lace at her full
+throat, her hair was gathered into a disorderly knot, and already there
+was a dab of paint on either cheek. She had been pretty when he married
+her, pretty and full of an engaging sparkle, a ready wit; but the charm
+had gone, the wit had hardened into a habit of sarcasm. They had been
+married twelve years, and in itself, everything considered, that was
+remarkable and held a great deal in her favor. She had been faithful. It
+was only lately, in Nantbrook, that her dissatisfaction had materialized
+in vague restless hints.
+
+“Frazee says Flavilla is sick,” he told her. “He thinks we ought to get
+Markley.”
+
+She made a gesture of skepticism. “All those doctors send you to each
+other,” she proclaimed. “Like as not he'll get half for doing it.”
+
+“She don't look right.”
+
+Bella's voice and attitude grew exasperated. “Of course you know all
+about children; you've been where you could study on them. And of course
+I have no sense; a woman's not the person to say when her child is sick
+or well. Have a doctor if you can pay one, and buy a lot of medicine
+too. There's some calomel upstairs, but that's no good. I'd like to know
+where you have all the money! God knows I need a little, to put inside
+me and out.”
+
+“It's right scarce,” he admitted, resolutely ignoring her tone. “Perhaps
+Flavilla will be better later in the day; I'll wait.”
+
+He spoke without conviction, denying the impulse to have her cared for
+at once, in an effort to content and still Bella. However, he failed in
+both of these aims. Her voice swept into a shrill complaint and abuse
+of Nantbrook--a place, she asserted, of one dead street, without even a
+passing trolley car to watch. She had no intention of being buried here
+for the rest of her life. Turning to a cigarette and yesterday's paper
+she drooped into a sulky shape of fat and slovenly blue wrapper beside
+the neglected dishes of their insufficient breakfast.
+
+He went through the empty house to the front again, where at least the
+sun was warm and bright. The air held a faint dry fragrance that came
+from the haymaking of the deep country in which Nantbrook lay. Lemuel
+Doret could see the hotel at a crossing on the left, a small gray block
+of stone with a flat portico, a heavy gilt beer sign and whitewashed
+sheds beyond. The barkeeper stood at a door, a huge girth circled by
+a soiled apron; nearer a bundle of brooms and glittering stacked paint
+cans marked the local store. It was, he was forced to admit, far
+from gay; but he found a great contentment in the sunny peace, in the
+limitless space of the unenclosed sky; the air, the fields, the birds in
+the trees were free.
+
+As he stood frowning in thought he saw the figure of a strange man
+walking over the road; Lemuel knew that he was strange by the formality
+of the clothes. He wore a hard straw hat, collar and diamond-pinned tie,
+and a suit with a waistcoat. At first Doret's interest was perfunctory,
+but as the other drew nearer his inspection changed to a painful
+absorption. Suddenly his attitude grew tense; he had the appearance of
+a man gazing at an enthralling but dangerous spectacle, such--for
+example--as a wall that might topple over, crushing anything human
+within its sweep.
+
+The object of this scrutiny had a pale countenance with a carefully
+clipped mustache, baggy eyes and a blue-shaved heavy jaw. An indefinable
+suggestion of haste sat on a progress not unduly hurried. But as he
+caught sight of Lemuel Doret he walked more and more slowly, returning
+his fixed attention. When the two men were opposite each other, only a
+few feet apart, he almost stopped. For a moment their sharpened visions
+met, parried, and then the stranger moved on. He made a few steps,
+hesitated, then directly returned.
+
+“Come inside,” he said in a slightly hoarse voice.
+
+“It suits me here,” Doret replied.
+
+The other regarded him steadily. “I've made no mistake,” he asserted. “I
+could almost say how long you were up for, and a few other little things
+too. I don't know what you're doing in this dump, but here we both are.”
+
+He waited for nothing more, ascending quickly to the hall. The two made
+their way into the improvised barber shop.
+
+“You've got me wrong,” Doret still insisted.
+
+“Who is it, Lem?” Bella demanded at the door.
+
+As she spoke an expression of geniality overspread her face, daubed with
+paint and discontent.
+
+“Why, I'll tell you--I'm June Bowman.”
+
+“That don't mean anything to us,” Lemuel continued. “The best thing you
+can do is keep right on going.”
+
+“Not that Fourth Ward stew?” Bella asked eagerly.
+
+He nodded.
+
+“Lem's kind of died on his feet,” she explained in a palpable excuse of
+her husband's ignorance; “he don't read the papers nor nothing. But of
+course I've heard of you, Mr. Bowman. We're glad to see you.”
+
+“Keep right along,” Lemuel Doret repeated. His face was dark and his
+mouth hardly more than a pinched line.
+
+“Now, who are you?” Bowman inquired.
+
+“I'll tell you,” Bella put in, “since his manners have gone with
+everything else. This is Snow Doret. If you know the live men that name
+will be familiar to you.”
+
+“I seem to remember it,” he admitted.
+
+“If Snow went in the city it's Lemuel here,” Doret told him. His anger
+seethed like a kettle beginning to boil.
+
+“Well, if Snow ever went I guess I'm in right. The truth is I got to
+lay off for a little, and this seems first-rate. I can explain it in a
+couple of words: Things went bad----”
+
+“Wasn't it the election?” Bella asked politely.
+
+“In a way,” he answered with a bow. “You're all right. A certain party,
+you see, was making some funny cracks--a reform dope; and he got in
+other certain parties' light, see? Word was sent round, and when a
+friend and me come on him some talk was passed and this public nuisance
+got something. It was all regular and paid for----”
+
+“I read about it,” Bella interrupted. “He died in the ambulance.”
+
+“Then I was slipped the news that they were going to elect me the pretty
+boy, and I had to make a break. Only temporary, till things are fixed.
+Thus you see me scattered with hayseed. I was walking through for a lift
+to Lancaster, where there are some good fellows; but when I saw Snow
+here taking the air I knew there was one nearer.”
+
+“Lemuel; and I'm no good fellow.”
+
+“That's the truth,” his wife added thinly. “Here is the only one in this
+house.” She touched her abundant self.
+
+“Then I can put up?”
+
+“No,” Lemuel Doret told him. “This is a house of God's.”
+
+Bella laughed in a rising hysterical key.
+
+“Listen to him,” she gasped; “listen to Snow Doret. It's no wonder you
+might have forgotten him,” she proclaimed; “he's been in the pen for ten
+and a half years with a bunch off for good conduct. But fifteen years
+ago--say! He went in for knifing a drug store keeper who held out on a
+'coke' deal. If this here's a house of God's I'd like to know what he
+called the one he had then. I couldn't tell you half of what went on,
+not half, with fixing drinks and frame-ups and skirts. Why, he run a hop
+joint with the Chinese and took a noseful of snow at every other breath.
+That was after his gambling room broke up--it got too raw even for the
+police. It was brandy with him, too, and there ain't a gutter in his
+district he didn't lay in. The drug store man wasn't the first he cut
+neither.”
+
+She stopped from sheer lack of breath.
+
+Curiously all that filled Lemuel Doret's mind was the thought of the
+glory of God. Everything Bella said was true; but in the might of the
+Savior it was less than nothing. He had descended into the pit and
+brought him, Snow, up, filling his ears with the sweet hymns of
+redemption, the promise of Paradise for the thieves and murderers who
+acknowledged His splendor and fought His fight. This marvelous charity,
+the cleansing hope for his blackened soul, swept over him in a warm rush
+of humble praise and unutterable gratitude. Nothing of the Lord's was
+lost: “His eye is on the sparrow.”
+
+“Certainly, lay off your coat,” Bella was urging; “it's fierce hot. Lem
+can rush a can of beer from the hotel. Even he wouldn't go to turn out
+one of the crowd in a hard fix. I'm awful glad you saw him.”
+
+With June Bowman in his house, engaged in verbal agreements with Bella
+and spreading comfortably on a chair, Lemuel was powerless. AH his
+instinct pressed him to send the other on, to refuse--in the commonest
+self-preservation--shelter. But both the laws of his old life and the
+commands of the new were against this act of simple precaution. Bowman
+eyed him with a shrewd appraisement.
+
+“A clever fellow,” he said, nodding; “admire you for coming out here for
+a while. Well, how about the suds?”
+
+He produced a thick roll of yellow-backed currency and detached a small
+bill. “I'll finance this campaign.”
+
+Lemuel Doret was confused by the rapidity with which the discredited
+past was re-created by Bowman's mere presence. He was at the point of
+refusing to fetch the beer when he saw that there was no explanation
+possible; they would regard him as merely crabbed, and Bella would
+indulge her habit of shrill abuse. It wasn't the drink itself that
+disturbed him but the old position of “rushing the can”--a symbol of
+so much that he had left forever. Forever; he repeated the word with a
+silent bitter force. The feel of the kettle in his hand, the thin
+odor of the beer and slopping foam, seemed to him evidences of acute
+degeneration; he was oppressed by a mounting dejection. God seemed very
+far away.
+
+His wife was talking while Bowman listened with an air of sympathetic
+wisdom.
+
+“It wasn't so bad then,” she said; “I was kind of glad to get away, and
+Lem was certain everything would open right out. But he's awful hard to
+do with; he wouldn't take a dollar from parties who had every right to
+stake him good, and borrowed five from no more than a stranger to buy
+that secondhand barber chair. What he needed was chloroform to separate
+these farmers from their dimes and whiskers.” Bowman laughed loudly, and
+a corresponding color invaded Bella. “Of course no one knew Lem had done
+time, then. They wouldn't have either, but for the Law and Order. Oh,
+dear me, no, your child ain't none of your own; they lend it to you like
+and then sneak up whenever the idea takes them, to see if it's getting
+a Turkish bath. I guess the people on the street wondered who was our
+swell automobile friend till they found out.”
+
+“I suppose,” Bowman put in, “they all came round and offered you the
+helping hand, wanted to see you happy and successful.”
+
+She laughed. “Them?” she demanded. “Them? The man that owns this
+house said that if he'd known, Lem would never had it; they don't want
+convicts in this town. This is a moral burg. That's more than the women
+said to me though--the starved buzzards; if they've spoke a word to me
+since I never heard it.” Her voice rose in sharp mimicry: “You, Katie,
+come right up on the porch, child! Don't you know--! See, I'm going by.”
+
+“I could have warned you of all that,” June Bowman asserted; “for the
+reason they're narrow, don't know anything about living or affairs;
+hypocritical too; long on churchgoing----”
+
+Doret regarded him solemnly. How blind he was, a mound of corruptible
+flesh! He put the beer down and turned abruptly away, going up to
+Flavilla. She seemed better; her face was white but most of the fever
+had gone. He listened to her harsh breathing with the conviction that
+she had caught a cold; and immediately after he was back from the store
+with a bottle of cherry pectoral. She liked the sweet taste of the thick
+bright-pink sirup and was soon quiet. Lemuel sniffed the mouth of the
+bottle suspiciously. It was doped, he finally decided, but not enough
+to hurt her; tasting it, a momentary desire for stinging liquor ran like
+fire through his nerves. He laughed at it, crushing and throwing aside
+the longing with a sense of contempt and triumph.
+
+He could hear occasionally Bowman's smooth periods and his wife's eager
+enjoyment of the discourse. His sense of worldly loneliness deepened;
+Flavilla seemed far away. All life was inexplicable--yes, and
+profitless, ending in weariness and death. The hunger for perfection,
+for God, that had been a constant part of his existence, the longing for
+peace and security, were almost unbearable. He had had a long struggle;
+the devil was deeply rooted in him. He could laugh at the broken tyranny
+of drugs and drink, but the passion for fine steel cutting edges
+was different, and twisted into every fiber. The rage that even yet
+threatened to flood him, sweeping away his painfully erected integrity,
+was different too. These things had made him a murderer.
+
+“... not the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
+
+He had a sudden muddled vision of another world, a world where sturdy
+men gave him their hands and in reality fulfilled June Bowman's mocking
+words. There the houses, the streets of his youth would have been
+impossible. Ah, he was thinking of another kind of heaven; it was a hop
+dream.
+
+There was a stir below and he heard the clatter of plates. Dinner was in
+preparation. “Lem!” his wife called. “Mr. Bowman wants you to go to the
+butcher's.”
+
+“Call me June,” he put in; adding: “Sure, Lem; the butcher's; we want
+a tenderloin, cut thick. You can't get any pep on greens; we ain't
+cattle.”
+
+Doret felt that he would have been infinitely happier with his own thin
+fare. In a manner he got comfort from a pinch of hunger; somehow the
+physical deprivation gave him a sense of purification. The other man,
+purple with the meat and beer, shook out a cigarette from a paper pack.
+
+“Always smoke caporal halves,” he proclaimed.
+
+The blue vapor from the three burning cigarettes rose and mingled.
+Bella was quiet, reflective; Bowman sat with half-shut speculative eyes;
+Lemuel Doret was again lost in visions.
+
+“How long are you taking the milk cure?” Bowman asked.
+
+Lemuel made no reply, but his wife smiled bitterly.
+
+“I had an idea,” the other continued; “but it's a little soon to spring
+anything. And I don't know but you might prefer it here.”
+
+“Try me,” Bella proclaimed; “that's all I want!”
+
+Doret still said nothing of his determination to conquer life in
+Nantbrook. A swift impulse seized him to take June Bowman by the collar
+and fling him into the street.
+
+“Just try me!” Bella repeated.
+
+He would be helpless in his, Doret's, hands. It was hard enough to be
+upright without an insinuating crook in the place. There was a heavy
+movement of feet in the front of the house, and he went out to meet a
+customer.
+
+Sliding the sensitive razor blade over a young tanned cheek he pondered
+moodily on the undesirable fact of June Bowman.
+
+Returning from this exercise of his trade he saw Bella descending the
+stair with a plate.
+
+“With all your going on over Flavilla,” she told him, “it never came to
+you that she'd like a piece of steak.”
+
+“But Doctor Frazee told us nothing solid. I took her up two eggs in the
+morning.”
+
+“Yes, and you'd had two dollars to pay as well if I hadn't showed you
+different. Flavilla's probably as well as any of us. I wish you would
+fix yourself a little, Lem. I'm tired of having you about the house in
+your suspenders.”
+
+He viewed her silently. Bella had on a dress he had never seen before,
+thin red-spotted yellow silk drawn tightly over a pronounced figure, a
+red girdle, and high-heeled patent-leather slippers.
+
+“If you're going to look like this,” he admitted, “I'll have to get a
+move on.”
+
+When they were first in Nantbrook she had worn a denim apron, and that,
+too, with all the other differences had seemed to express their new
+life; but now in yellow silk she was back in the old. Lemuel Doret
+studied his wife with secret doubt; more than the dress had changed.
+She seemed younger; rather she was adopting a younger manner. In the
+presence of June Bowman it intensified.
+
+“That idea I spoke about,” the latter advanced: “I've been sizing
+you up, the both of you, and you look good. Well, I've got hold of
+a concession on the Atlantic Boardwalk and the necessary cash is in
+sight.” He turned to Lemuel. “How would you like to run a bowling game?
+It's on the square and would give you a lead into something bigger.
+You're wise; why, you might turn into a shore magnate, with Bella here
+dressed up in stones.”
+
+Doret shook his head. “Treasure on earth,” he thought; “moth and rust.”
+ But it would be hopeless to attempt any explanation. “No,” he said;
+“we'll play it out here.”
+
+“We will?” Bella echoed him. “Indeed! We will?” Now the emphasis was
+sharply on the first word. “What's going to keep me?”
+
+“You're my wife,” he replied simply; “we have a child.”
+
+“Times have changed, Snow,” Bowman interrupted. “You ought to read the
+papers. This is ladies' day. The old harem stuff don't go no longer.
+They are emancipated.”
+
+“Lemuel,” Doret insisted, a narrowed hard gaze on the other man; “Lemuel
+Doret.”
+
+“He thinks nobody'll remember,” his wife explained. “Lem's redeemed.”
+
+“Your name's what you say,” Bowman agreed, “but remember this--you can't
+throw any scare into me. I'm no Fauntleroy, neither. Behave.”
+
+The anger seethed again beneath Lemuel's restraint. It began to be
+particular, personal, focused on Bowman; and joined to it was a petty
+dislike for the details of the man's appearance, the jaunty bearing and
+conspicuous necktie, the gloss of youth over the unmistakable signs of
+degeneration, the fatty pouches of his eyes and loose throat.
+
+“I wouldn't bother with scaring you,” he told him. “Why should I? You've
+got no kick. I took you in, didn't I? And all I said was my name. Snow
+Doret's dead; he died in prison; and this Lemuel's all different----”
+
+“I've heard about that too,” Bowman returned; “but somehow I don't take
+stock in these miracles.”
+
+“If you ever see me looking like I might be Snow, go quiet,” Lemuel
+advised. “That's all.”
+
+With clenched hands he abruptly departed. The cords of his neck were
+swollen and rigid; there was a haze before his eyes. He went up to the
+refuge of his daughter's room. She was lying still, breathing thickly,
+with a finger print of scarlet on each cheek.
+
+She was so thin, so wasted, the bed and room so stripped of every
+comfort, that he dropped forward on his knees, his arms outflung across
+her body in an inarticulate prayer for faith, for strength and patience.
+
+It was not much he wanted--only food for one child and help for a woman,
+and a grip on the devil tearing at him in the form of hatred.
+
+He got only a temporary relief, for when he went down Bella and June
+Bowman were whispering together; he passed the door with his silent
+tread and saw their heads close. Bella was actually pretty.
+
+An astonishing possibility occurred to him--perhaps Bella would go away
+with Bowman. An unbidden deep relief at such a prospect invaded him; how
+happy he could be with Flavilla. They would get a smaller house, which
+Flavilla would soon learn to keep for him; they would go to church and
+prayer meeting together, her soprano voice and his bass joined in the
+praise of the Lord, of the Almighty who raised the dead and his Son, who
+took the thief to glory.
+
+This speculation was overcome by a troubled mind; both his innate pride
+in his wife as an institution of his honor, the feeling that he would
+uphold it at any cost, and his Christianity interrupted the vision of
+release. He must not let her stumble, and he would see that June Bowman
+didn't interfere in his home. More beer made its appearance, and the
+other man grew louder, boastful. He exhibited the roll of money--that
+was nothing, four times that much could be had from the same source. He
+was a spender, too, and treated all his friends liberally. Lemuel was
+to see if there was any wine in the damned jumping-off place; and when
+would they all go to Atlantic?
+
+“Never,” Doret repeated.
+
+Bowman laughed skeptically.
+
+The rage stirred and increased, blinding Lemuel Doret's heart, stinging
+his eyes. Bella, watching him, became quieter, and she gave June--she
+called him June--a warning pressure of her fingers. Her husband saw it
+with indifference; everything small was lost in the hot tide enveloping
+him. His hands twitched, but there was no other outward sign of his
+tumult. He smoked his cigarettes with extreme deliberation.
+
+It was evening again, and they were sitting on the narrow porch. The
+west was a serene lake of fading light against which the trees made dark
+blots of foliage. Nantbrook seemed unreal, a place of thin shadow, the
+future unsubstantial as well; only the past was actual in Lemuel Doret's
+mind--the gray cold prison, the city at night, locked rooms filled with
+smoke and lurid lights, avaricious voices in the mechanical sentences of
+gambling, agonized tones begging for a shot, just a shot, of an addicted
+drug, a girl crying.
+
+He tried to sing a measure of praise beneath his breath but the tune and
+words evaded him. He glanced furtively at Bowman's complacent bulk, the
+flushed face turned fatuously to Bella. Under the other's left arm his
+coat was drawn smoothly on a cushion of fat.
+
+Later Lemuel stopped at Flavilla's bed, and though she was composed he
+was vaguely alarmed at what seemed to him an unreal rigidity. She was
+not asleep, but sunk in a stupor with a glimmer of vision and an elusive
+pulse. He should not have listened to Bella but had a doctor as Frazee
+had advised. It appeared now that--with all Flavilla held for him--he
+had been strangely neglectful. At the same time he was conscious of
+the steady increase of his hatred for Bowman. This was natural, he told
+himself; Bowman in a way was the past--all that he, Doret, had put out
+of his life. At least he had believed that accomplished, yet here it
+was back again, alive and threatening; drinking beer in his rooms,
+whispering to his wife, putting the thought of Flavilla from his head.
+
+In the morning even Bella admitted that Flavilla might be sick and a
+doctor necessary. He took one look at his daughter's burning face, heard
+the shrill labor of her breathing, and hurried downstairs with a set
+face. He was standing with Bella in the hall when June Bowman descended.
+
+“Flavilla ain't right,” she told him.
+
+The latter promptly exhibited the wad of money. “Whatever you need,” he
+said.
+
+“Put it away,” Lemuel replied shortly. “I don't want any of that for
+Flavilla.”
+
+Bowman studied him. Doret made no effort to mask his bitterness, and the
+other whistled faintly. Bella laughed, turning from her husband.
+
+“He's cracked,” she declared; “you'll get no decency off him. A body
+would think I had been in jail and him looking out for her all those ten
+years and more. I can say thank you, though; we'll need your help, and
+glad.”
+
+“Put it away,” Lemuel Doret repeated. He was more than ever catlike,
+alert, bent slightly forward with tense fingers.
+
+Bowman was unperturbed. “I told you about this flash stuff,” he
+observed. “Nobody's forcing money on you. Get the bend out of you and
+give me a shave. That'll start you on the pills.”
+
+Lemuel Doret mechanically followed him into the rude barber shop; he was
+fascinated by the idea of laying the razor across Bowman's throat.
+The latter extended himself in the chair and Doret slowly, thoroughly,
+covered his lower face with lather, through which the blade drew with a
+clean smooth rip. A fever burned in the standing man's brain, he fought
+constantly against a stiffening of his employed fingers--a swift turn,
+a cutting twist. Subconsciously he called noiselessly upon the God that
+had sustained him and, divided between apprehension and the increasing
+lust to kill, his lips held the form in which they had pronounced that
+impressive name. He had the sensation of battling against a terrific
+wind, a remorseless force beating him to submission. His body ached from
+the violence of the struggle to keep his hand steadily, evenly, busied,
+following in a delicate sweep the cords of June Bowman's neck, the
+jugulars.
+
+The other looked up at him and grinned confidently. “Little children,”
+ he said, “love one another.”
+
+Lemuel stopped, the razor suspended in air; there was a din in his
+ears, his vision blurred, his grip tightened on the bone handle. A sweat
+started out on his brow and he found himself dabbing June Bowman's face
+with a wet cold towel.
+
+“Witch hazel?” he asked mechanically.
+
+Suddenly he was so tired that his legs seemed incapable of support.
+He wiped the razor blade and put it away with a lax nerveless hand.
+He realized that he had been again at the point of murder. He had been
+saved by the narrowest margin in the world. For a moment the fact that
+he had been saved absorbed him, and then the imminent danger of his
+position, his weakness, filled him with the sense of failure, a
+heavy feeling of hopelessness. His prayers and singing, his plans for
+redemption, for a godly life, had threatened to end at the first assault
+of evil.
+
+He temporarily overcame his dejection at the memory of Flavilla. Doctor
+Markley lived in a larger town than Nantbrook, a dozen miles beyond the
+fields and green hills, and he must get him by telephone. Then there was
+the problem of payment. The doctor, he knew, would expect his fee, two
+dollars, immediately from such an applicant as himself; and he had less
+than a dollar. He explained something of this over the wire, adding that
+if Markley would see Flavilla at the end of the day the money would be
+forthcoming. That, the crisp, disembodied tone replied, was impossible;
+he must call in the middle of the morning, but no difficulty would be
+made about his bill; Doret could send the amount to him promptly.
+
+He hurried back to the house with this information, and found Bella
+seated in the kitchen, the inevitable cigarette throwing up its ribbon
+of smoke from her fingers, and June Bowman at her shoulder. Lemuel
+ignored the latter.
+
+“The doctor'll be here at about eleven,” he announced. “Mind you listen
+to all he says and get Flavilla into a clean nightgown and sheets.”
+
+“What's the matter with your tending to her?” Bella demanded.
+
+“I won't be here; not till night. I'm going to put up hay with one of
+the farmers. I hear they're in a hurry and offering good money.”
+
+Bella's expression was strange. She laughed in a forced way.
+
+“We got to hand it to you,” Bowman admitted genially; “you're there. I
+guess I'd starve before ever it would come to me to fork hay.”
+
+Lemuel's wife added nothing; her lips twisted into a fixed smile at once
+defiant and almost tremulous. Well, he was late now; he couldn't linger
+to inquire into Bella's moods. Yet at the door he hesitated again to
+impress on her the importance of attending the doctor's every word.
+
+It seemed to him an hour later that he was burning up in a dry
+intolerable haze of sun and hay. He awkwardly balanced heavy ragged
+forkfuls, heaving them onto the mounting stack of the wagon in a paste
+of sweat and dust. His eyes were filmed and his throat dry. He struggled
+on in the soft unaccustomed tyranny of the grass, the glare of sun, with
+his mind set on the close of day. He thought of cool shadows, of city
+streets wet at night, and a swift plunge into a river where it swept
+about the thrust of a wharf. He wondered what Doctor Markley would say
+about Flavilla; probably the child wasn't seriously sick.
+
+The day drew apparently into a tormenting eternity; the physical effort
+he welcomed; it seemed to exhaust that devil in him which had so
+nearly betrayed and ruined him forever in the morning; but the shifting
+slippery hay, the fiery dust, the incandescent blaze created an inferno
+in the midst of which his mind whirled with monotonous giddy images and
+half-meaningless phrases spoken and re-spoken. Yet the sun was not, as
+he had begun to suppose, still in the sky; it sank toward the horizon,
+the violet shadows slipped out from the western hills, and Lemuel
+finished his toil in a swimming gold mist. It was two miles to
+Nantbrook, and disregarding his aching muscles he hurried over the
+gray undulating road. The people of the village were gathered on their
+commanding porches, the barkeeper at the hotel bulked in his doorway.
+The lower part of Lemuel's own house was closed; no one appeared as he
+mounted the insecure steps.
+
+“Bella!” he cried in an overwhelming anxiety before he reached the hall.
+
+There was no reply. He paused inside and called again. His voice echoed
+about the bare walls; he heard a dripping from the kitchen sink; nothing
+more.
+
+“I'd better go up,” he said aloud with a curious tightening of his
+throat. He progressed evenly up the stairs; suddenly a great weight
+seemed to bow his shoulders; the illusion was so vivid that he actually
+staggered; he was incapable of breaking from his measured progress. He
+turned directly into Flavilla's room. She was there--he saw her at
+once. But Bella hadn't put a fresh nightgown on her, and the sheets were
+disordered and unchanged.
+
+Lemuel took a step forward; then he stopped. “The fever's gone,” he
+vainly told the dread freezing about his heart at a stilled white face.
+
+“Yes,” he repeated with numb lips; “it's gone.”
+
+He approached the bed and standing over it and the meager body he cursed
+softly and wonderingly. The light was failing and it veiled the sharp
+lines of the dead child's countenance. For a moment his gaze strayed
+about the room and he felt a swift sorrow at its ugliness. He had wanted
+pretty things, pictures and a bright carpet and ribbons, for Flavilla.
+Then he was conscious of a tearing rage, but now he was unmindful of it,
+impervious to its assault in the fixed necessity of the present.
+
+Later----
+
+He was sitting again on his porch, after the momentary morbid stir of
+curiosity and small funeral, when the unrestrained sweep of his own
+emotion overcame him. His appearance had not changed; it was impossible
+for his expression to become bleaker; but there was a tremendous change
+within. Yet it was not strange; rather he had the sensation of returning
+to an old familiar condition. There he was at ease; he moved swiftly,
+surely forward in the realization of what lay ahead.
+
+Bella and June Bowman had left the house almost directly after him, and
+Markley, finding it empty, with no response to his repeated knocking,
+had turned away, being as usual both impatient and hurried. Yes, Bella
+had gone and left Flavilla without even a glass of water. But Bella
+didn't matter. He couldn't understand this--except where he saw at last
+that she never had mattered; yet it was so. June Bowman was different.
+
+There was no rush about the latter--to-morrow, next week would do
+equally. There was no doubt either. Lemuel Doret gave a passing thought,
+like a half-contemptuous gesture of final dismissal, to so much that had
+lately occupied him. The shadow of a smile disfigured his metallic lips.
+
+The following noon he shut the door of his house with a sharp impact and
+made his way over the single street of Nantbrook toward the city. His
+fear of it had vanished; and when he reached the steel-bound towering
+masonry, the pouring crowds, he moved directly to a theater from which
+an audience composed entirely of men was passing out by the posters of a
+hectic burlesque.
+
+“Clegett?” he asked at the grille of the box office.
+
+A small man with a tilted black derby came from the darkened auditorium.
+
+“Where have you been?” he demanded as he caught sight of Lemuel Doret.
+“I asked two or three but you might have been dead for all of them.”
+
+“That's just about what I have,” Doret answered. “Mr. Clegett, I'd like
+a little money.”
+
+“How little?”
+
+“A hundred would be plenty.”
+
+The other without hesitation produced a fold of currency, from which he
+transferred an amount to Lemuel Doret. It went into his pocket without a
+glance. He hesitated a moment, then added: “This will be all.”
+
+Clegett nodded. “It might, and it might not,” he asserted; “but you
+can't jam me. You're welcome to that, anyhow. It was coming to you. I
+wondered when you'd be round.”
+
+It was not far from the theater to a glittering hardware store, a place
+that specialized in sporting goods. There were cases of fishing reels,
+brilliant tied flies and varnished, gayly wrapped cane rods, gaffs and
+coiled wire leaders, and an impressive assortment of modern pistols,
+rifles and shotguns.
+
+“Something small and neat,” Doret told the man in charge of the weapons.
+
+He examined a compact automatic pistol, a blunted shape no larger than
+his palm. It was a beautiful mechanism, and as with his silken razors,
+merely to hold it, to test the smooth action, gave him a sense of
+pleasure.
+
+Later, seated in a quiet cafe, an adjunct of the saloon below, he could
+not resist the temptation of taking the pistol in its rubber holster
+from his pocket, merely to finger the delicate trigger. There was no
+hurry. He knew his world thoroughly: it was a small land in which the
+inhabitants had constant knowledge of each other. A question in the
+right place would bring all the information he needed. Lemuel was
+absolutely composed, actually he was a little sleepy; longing and inner
+strife, dreams, were at an end; only an old familiar state, a thoroughly
+comprehensible purpose remained.
+
+A girl--she could have been no more than fourteen--was hurriedly
+slipping a paper of white crystalline powder into a glass of
+sarsaparilla. She smiled at him as she saw his indifferent
+interrogation.
+
+“It's better rolled with a pencil first,” he said, and then returned to
+the contemplation of his own affair.
+
+The result of this was that, soon after, he was seated in the smoking
+car of an electric train that, hurtling across a sedgy green expanse of
+salt meadow, deposited him in a colorful thronging city built on sand
+and the rim of the sea. It was best to avoid if possible even a casual
+inquiry, and Bowman had spoken of Atlantic City. The afternoon was
+hot and bright, the beach was still dotted with groups of bathers;
+and Lemuel Doret found an inconspicuous place in a row of swing chairs
+protected by an awning ... where he waited for evening. Below him a
+young woman lay contentedly with her head in a youth's lap; a child in a
+red scrap of bathing suit dug sturdily with an ineffectual tin spade.
+
+The day declined, the water darkened and the groups vanished from the
+beach. An attendant was stacking the swing chairs, and Lemuel Doret
+left his place. The boardwalk, elevated above him, was filled with a
+gay multitude, subdued by the early twilight and the brightening
+lemon-yellow radiance of the strung globes. Drifting, with only his gaze
+alert, in the scented mob, he stopped at an unremarkable lunch room
+for coffee, and afterward turned down a side avenue to where some
+automobiles waited at the curb. A driver moved from his seat as Lemuel
+approached, but after a closer inspection the former's interest died.
+
+Doret lighted a cigarette. “How are they hitting you?” he asked
+negligently.
+
+“Bad; but the season ain't opened up right yet. It'll have to soon,
+though, if they want me; gas has gone to where it's like shoving
+champagne into your car.”
+
+“The cafés doing anything?”
+
+“None except the Torquay; but the cabaret they got takes all the
+profits. That's on the front. Then there's the World, back of the town.
+It's colored, but white go. Quite a place--I saw a sailor come out last
+night hashed with a knife.”
+
+He found the Torquay, a place of brilliant illumination and color,
+packed with tables about a dancing floor, and small insistent orchestra.
+He sat against the wall by the entrance, apparently sunk in apathy, but
+his vision searched the crowd like the cutting bar of light thrown on
+the intermittent singers. He renewed his order. Toward midnight a fresh
+influx of people swept in; his search was unsatisfied.
+
+The cigarette girl, pinkly pretty with an exaggerated figure, carrying a
+wooden tray with her wares, stopped at his gesture.
+
+“Why don't you hang that about your neck with something?” he inquired.
+
+“And get round shouldered!” she demanded. Her manner became
+confidential. “I do get fierce tired,” she admitted; “nine till
+two-thirty.”
+
+He asked for a particular brand of cigarette.
+
+“We haven't got them.” She studied him with a memorizing frown. “They
+are hardly ever asked for; and now--yes, there was a man, last night, I
+think----”
+
+“He must have made an impression.”
+
+“Another move and I'd slapped him if I lost my job. They got to be some
+fresh when they disturb me, too.”
+
+“Alone, then?”
+
+“That's right. Wanted me to meet him, and showed me a roll of money.
+Me!” her contempt sharpened.
+
+“He was young?”
+
+“Young nothing, with gray in his shoebrush mustache.”
+
+By such small things, Lemuel Doret reflected, the freshness that had
+fixed June Bowman in the girl's memory, men were marked and followed.
+
+“I told him,” she volunteered further, “he didn't belong on the
+boardwalk but in the rough joints past the avenue.”
+
+Paying for his drink Doret left the Torquay; and following the slight
+pressure of two suggestions and a faint possibility he found himself in
+a sodden dark district where a red-glass electric sign proclaimed the
+entrance to the World. An automobile stopped and a chattering group of
+young colored girls in sheer white with vivid ribbons, accompanied
+by sultry silent negroes, preceded him into the café. He was met by a
+brassy racket and a curiously musty heavy air.
+
+The room was long and narrow, and on one wall a narrow long platform was
+built above the floor for the cabaret. There was a ledge about the other
+walls the width of one table, and below that the space was crowded by
+a singular assembly. There were women faintly bisque in shade, with
+beautiful regular features, and absolute blacks with flattened noses and
+glistening eyes in burning red and green muslins. Among them were white
+girls with untidy bright-gold hair, veiled gaze and sullen painted
+lips; white men sat scattered through the darker throng, men like Lemuel
+Doret, quiet and watchful, others laughing carelessly, belligerent, and
+still more sunk in a stupor of drink.
+
+Perhaps ten performers occupied the stage, and at one end was the
+hysterical scraping on strings, the muffled hammered drums, that
+furnished the rhythm for a slow intense waltz.
+
+Yet in no detail was the place so marked as by an indefinable oppressive
+atmosphere. The strong musk and edged perfumes, the races, distinct and
+subtly antagonistic or mingled and spoiled, the rasping instruments,
+combined in an unnatural irritating pressure; they produced an actual
+sensation of cold and staleness like that from the air of a vault.
+
+Doret ordered beer in a bottle, and watched the negro waitress snap
+off the cap. He had never seen a café such as this before, and he was
+engaged, slightly; its character he expressed comprehensively in the
+word “bad.”
+
+A wonderfully agile dancer caught the attention of the room.
+The musicians added their voices to the jangle, and the minor
+half-inarticulate wail, the dull regular thudding of the bass drum were
+savage. The song fluctuated and died; the dancer dropped exhausted into
+her chair.
+
+Then Lemuel saw June Bowman. He was only a short distance away,
+and--without Bella--seated alone but talking to the occupants of the
+next table. Lemuel Doret was composed. In his pocket he removed the
+automatic pistol from its rubber case. Still there was no hurry--Bowman
+was half turned from him, absolutely at his command. The other twisted
+about, his glance swept the room, and he recognized Doret. He half
+rose from his chair, made a gesture of acknowledgment that died before
+Lemuel's stony face, and sank back into his place. Lemuel saw Bowman's
+hand slip under his coat, but it came out immediately; the fingers
+drummed on the table.
+
+The careless fool--he was unarmed.
+
+There was no hurry; he could make one, two steps at Bowman's slightest
+movement.... Lemuel thought of Flavilla deserted, dying alone with
+a parched mouth, of all that had gone to wreck in the evil that had
+overtaken him--the past that could not, it appeared, be killed. Yet
+where Bowman was the past, it was nearly over. He'd finish the beer
+before him, that would leave some in the bottle, and then end it.
+With the glass poised in his hand he heard an absurd unexpected sound.
+Looking up he saw that it came from the platform, from a black woman in
+pale-blue silk, a short ruffled skirt and silver-paper ornaments in her
+tightly crinkled hair. She was singing, barely audibly:
+
+  _“Oh, children ... lost in Egypt
+  See that chariot....
+  ... good tidings!”_
+
+Even from his table across the room he realized that she was sunk in
+an abstraction; her eyes were shut and her body rocking in beat to the
+line.
+
+“Good tidings,” she sang.
+
+A negro close beside Doret looked up suddenly, and his voice joined in a
+humming undertone, “See that chariot, oh, good tidings ... that Egyptian
+chariot.”
+
+A vague emotion stirred within Lemuel Doret, the singing annoyed him,
+troubled him with memories of perishing things. Another joined, and the
+spiritual swelled slightly, haltingly above the clatter of glasses and
+laughter. The woman who had begun it was swept to her feet; she
+stood with her tinsel gayety of apparel making her tragic ebony face
+infinitely grotesque and tormented while her tone rose in a clear
+emotional soprano:
+
+  _“Children of Israel, unhappy slaves,
+  Good tidings, good tidings,
+  For that chariot's coming,
+  God's chariot's coming, ... coming,
+  ........... chariot out of Egypt.”_
+
+The magic of her feeling swept like a flame over the room; shrill mirth,
+mocking calls, curses were bound in a louder and louder volume of hope
+and praise. The negroes were on their feet, swaying in the hysterical
+contagion of melody, the unutterable longing of their alien isolation.
+
+“God's chariot's coming.” The song filled the roof, hung with bright
+strips of paper, it boomed through the windows and doors. Sobbing cries
+cut through it, profound invocations, beautiful shadowy voices chimed
+above the weight of sound.
+
+It beat like a hammer on Lemuel Doret's brain and heart. Suddenly he
+couldn't breathe, and he rose with a gasp, facing the miracle that had
+overtaken the place he called bad. God's chariot--was there! He heard
+God's very tone directed at him. Borne upward on the flood of exaltation
+he seemed to leave the earth far, far away. Something hard, frozen, in
+him burst, and tears ran over his face; he was torn by fear and terrible
+joy. His Lord....
+
+He fell forward on his knees, an arm overturning the bottle of beer;
+and, his sleeve dabbled in it, he pressed his head against the cold edge
+of the table, praying wordlessly for faith, incoherently ravished by the
+marvel of salvation, the knowledge of God here, everywhere.
+
+The harmony wavered and sank, and out of the shuddering silence that
+followed Lemuel Doret turned again from the city.
+
+
+
+
+THE FLOWER OF SPAIN
+
+I
+
+From the window of the drawing-room Lavinia Sanviano could see, on the
+left, the Statue of Garibaldi, where the Corso Regina Maria cut into the
+Lungarno; on the right, and farther along, the gray-green foliage of the
+Cascine. Before her the Arno flowed away, sluggish and without a wrinkle
+or reflection on its turbid surface, into Tuscany. It was past the
+middle of afternoon, and a steady procession of carriages and mounted
+officers in pale blue tunics moved below toward the shade of the
+Cascine.
+
+Lavinia could not see this gay progress very well, for the window--it
+had only a narrow ledge guarded by an iron grille--was practically
+filled by her sister, Gheta, and Anna Mantegazza. Occasionally
+she leaned forward, pressed upon Gheta's shoulder, for a hasty
+unsatisfactory glimpse.
+
+“You are crushing my sleeves!” Gheta finally and sharply complained.
+“Do go somewhere else. Anna and I want to talk without your young ears
+eternally about. When do you return to the convent?”
+
+Lavinia drew back. However, she didn't leave. She was accustomed to her
+sister's complaining, and--unless the other went to their father--she
+ignored her hints. Lavinia's curiosity in worldly scenes and topics was
+almost as full as her imagination thereof. She was sixteen, and would
+have to endure another year of obscurity before her marriage could be
+thought of, or she take any part in the social life where Gheta moved
+with such marked success.
+
+But, Lavinia realized with a sigh, she couldn't expect to be pursued
+like Gheta, who was very beautiful. Gheta was so exceptional that she
+had been introduced to the Florentine polite world without the customary
+preliminary of marriage. She could, almost every one agreed, marry very
+nearly whomever and whenever she willed. Even now, after the number of
+years she had been going about with practically all her friends wedded,
+no one seriously criticized the Sanvianos for not insisting on a match
+with one of the several eligibles who had unquestionably presented
+themselves.
+
+Gheta was slender and round; her complexion had the flawless pallid
+bloom of a gardenia; her eyes and hair were dark, and her lips an
+enticing scarlet thread. Perhaps her chin was a trifle lacking in
+definition, her voice a little devoid of warmth; but those were
+minor defects in a person so precisely radiant. Her dress was always
+noticeably lovely; at present she wore pink tulle over lustrous gray,
+with a high silver girdle, a narrow black velvet band and diamond clasp
+about her delicate full throat.
+
+Anna Mantegazza was more elaborately gowned, in white embroidery, with
+a little French hat; but Anna Mantegazza was an American with millions,
+and elaboration was a commonplace with her. Lavinia wore only a simple
+white slip, confined about her flexible waist with a yellow ribbon; and
+she was painfully conscious of the contrast she presented to the two
+women seated in the front of the window.
+
+The fact was that a whole fifth of the Sanvianos' income was spent
+on Gheta's clothes; and this left only the most meager provision for
+Lavinia. But this, the latter felt, was just--still in the convent,
+she required comparatively little personal adornment; while the other's
+beauty demanded a worthy emphasis. Later Lavinia would have tulle and
+silver lace. She wished, however, that Gheta would get married; for
+Lavinia knew that even if she came home she would be held back until the
+older sister was settled. It was her opinion that Gheta was very silly
+to show such indifference to Cesare Orsi.... Suddenly she longed to have
+men--not fat and good-natured like the Neapolitan banker, but austere
+and romantic--in love with her. She clasped her hands to her fine young
+breast and a delicate color stained her cheeks. She stood very straight
+and her breathing quickened through parted lips.
+
+She was disturbed by the echo of a voice from the cool depths of the
+house, and turned at approaching footfalls. The room was so high and
+large that its stiff gilt and brocade furnishing appeared insignificant.
+Three long windows faced the Lungarno, but two were screened with green
+slatted blinds and heavily draped, and the light within was silvery and
+illusive. A small man in correct English clothes, with a pointed bald
+head and a heavy nose, entered impulsively.
+
+“It's Bembo,” Lavinia announced flatly.
+
+“Of course it's Bembo,” he echoed vivaciously. “Who's more faithful to
+the Casa Sanviano----”
+
+“At tea time,” Lavinia interrupted.
+
+“Lavinia,” her sister said sharply, “don't be impertinent. There are so
+many strangers driving,” she continued, to the man; “do stand and tell
+us who they are. You know every second person in Europe.”
+
+He pressed eagerly forward, and Anna Mantegazza turned and patted his
+hand.
+
+“I wish you were so attentive to Pier and myself,” she remarked,
+both light and serious. “I'd like to buy you--you're indispensable in
+Florence.”
+
+“Contessa!” he protested. “Delighted! At once.”
+
+“Bembo,” Gheta demanded, “duty--who's that in the little carriage with
+the bells bowed over the horses?”
+
+He leaned out over the grille, his beady alert gaze sweeping the way
+below.
+
+“Litolff,” he pronounced without a moment's hesitation--“a Russian
+swell. The girl with him is----” He stopped with a side glance at
+Lavinia, a slight shrug.
+
+“Positively, Lavinia,” Gheta insisted again, more crossly, “you're a
+nuisance! When do you go back to school?”
+
+“In a week,” Lavinia answered serenely.
+
+With Bembo added to the others, she could see almost nothing of the
+scene below. Across the river the declining sun cast a rosy light on the
+great glossy hedges and clipped foliage of the Boboli Gardens; far to
+the left the paved height of the Piazzale Michelangelo rose above the
+somber sweep of roofs and bridges; an aged bell rang harshly and mingled
+with the inconsequential clatter on the Lungarno. An overwhelming sense
+of the mystery of being stabbed, sharp as a knife, at her heart; a
+choking longing possessed her to experience all--all the wonders of
+life, but principally love.
+
+“Look, Bembo!” Anna Mantegazza suddenly exclaimed. “No;
+there--approaching! Who's that singular person in the hired carriage?”
+
+Her interest was so roused that Lavinia, once more forgetful of
+Gheta's sleeves, leaned over her sister's shoulder, and immediately
+distinguished the object of their curiosity.
+
+An open cab was moving slowly, almost directly under the window, with a
+single patron--a slender man, sitting rigidly erect, in a short, black
+shell jacket, open upon white linen, a long black tie, and a soft narrow
+scarlet sash. He wore a wide-brimmed stiff felt hat slanted over a thin
+countenance burned by the sun as dark as green bronze; his face was as
+immobile as metal, too; it bore, as if permanently molded, an expression
+of excessive contemptuous pride.
+
+Bembo's voice rose in a babble of excited information.
+
+“'Singular?' Why, that's one of the most interesting men alive. It's
+Abrego y Mochales, the greatest bullfighter in existence, the Flower of
+Spain. I've seen him in the ring and at San Sebastian with the King; and
+I can assure you that one was hardly more important than the other. He's
+idolized by every one in Spain and South America; women of all classes
+fall over each other with declarations and gifts.”
+
+As if he had heard the pronouncement of his name the man in the cab
+turned sharply and looked up. Gheta was leaning out, and his gaze
+fastened upon her with a sudden and extraordinary intensity. Lavinia
+saw that her sister, without dissembling her interest, sat forward,
+statuesque and lovely. It seemed to the former that the cab was an
+intolerable time passing; she wished to draw Gheta back, to cover
+her indiscretion from Anna Mantegazza's prying sight. She sighed with
+inexplicable relief when she saw that the man had driven beyond them and
+that he did not turn.
+
+A bull-fighter! A blurred picture formed in Lavinia's mind from the
+various details she had read and heard of the cruelty of the Spanish
+national sport--torn horses, stiff on blood-soaked sand; a frenzied
+and savage populace; and charging bulls, drenched with red froth. She
+shuddered.
+
+“What a brute!” she spoke aloud unintentionally.
+
+Gheta glanced at her out of a cool superiority, but Anna Mantegazza
+nodded vigorously.
+
+“He would be a horrid person!” she affirmed.
+
+“How silly!” Gheta responded. “It's an art, like the opera; he's an
+artist in courage. Personally I find it rather fascinating. Most men are
+so--so mild.”
+
+Lavinia knew that the other was thinking of Cesare Orsi, and she agreed
+with her sister that Orsi was far too mild. Without the Orsi fortune--he
+had much more even than Anna Mantegazza--Cesare would simply get
+nowhere. The Spaniard--Lavinia could not recall his name, although it
+hung elusively among her thoughts--was different; women of all classes,
+Bembo had said, pursued him with favors. He could be cruel, she
+decided, and shivered a little vicariously. She half heard Bembo's rapid
+high-pitched excitement over trifles.
+
+“You are going to the Guarinis' sale to-morrow afternoon? But, of
+course, every one is. Well, if I come across Abrego y Mochales before
+then, and I'm almost certain to, and he'll come, I'll bring him. He's as
+proud as the devil--duchesses, you see--so no airs with him. The
+Flower of Spain. A king of sport sits high at the table--” He went on,
+apparently interminable; but Lavinia turned away to where tea was being
+laid in a far angle.
+
+Others approached over the tiled hall and the Marchese Sanviano entered
+with Cesare Orsi. The window was deserted, and the women trailed
+gracefully toward the bubbling minor note of the alcohol lamp. Both
+Sanviano and Orsi were big men--the former, like Bembo, wore English
+clothes; but Orsi's ungainly body had been tightly garbed by a Southern
+military tailor, making him--Lavinia thought--appear absolutely
+ridiculous. His collar was both too tight and too high, although
+perspiration promised relief from the latter.
+
+A general and unremarkable conversation mingled with the faint rattle of
+passing cups and low directions to a servant. Lavinia was seated next to
+Cesare Orsi, but she was entirely oblivious of his heavy kindly face and
+almost anxiously benevolent gaze. He spoke to her, and because she had
+comprehended nothing of his speech she smiled at him with an absent and
+illuminating charm. He smiled back, happy in her apparent pleasure; and
+his good-nature was so insistent that she was impelled to reward it with
+a remark.
+
+She thought, she said, that Gheta was particularly lovely this
+afternoon. He agreed eagerly; and Lavinia wondered whether she had been
+clumsy. She simply couldn't imagine marrying Cesare Orsi, but she knew
+that such a match for Gheta was freely discussed, and she hoped that her
+sister would not make difficulties. She wouldn't have dresses so
+fussy as Gheta's--in figure, anyhow, she was perhaps her sister's
+superior--fine materials, simply cut, with a ruffle at the throat and
+hem, a satin wrap pointed at the back, with a soft tassel....
+
+Orsi was talking to Gheta, and she was answering him with a brevity
+that had cast a shade of annoyance over the Marchese Sanviano's large
+features. Lavinia agreed with her father that Gheta was a fool. She must
+be thirty, the younger suddenly realized. Bembo was growing hysterical
+from the tea and his own shrill anecdotes. He resembled a grotesque
+performing bird with a large beak. Lavinia's mind returned to the silent
+dark man who had passed in a cab. She wished, now, that she had been
+sitting at the front of the window--the object of his unsparing intense
+gaze. She realized that he was extremely handsome, and contrasted his
+erect slim carriage with Orsi's thick slouched shoulders. The latter
+interrupted her look, misinterpreted it, and said something about candy
+from Giacosa's.
+
+Lavinia thanked him and rose; the discussion about the tea table became
+unbearably stupid, no better than the flat chatter of the nuns at
+school.
+
+Her room was small and barely furnished, with a thin rug over the stone
+floor, and opened upon the court about which the house was built. The
+Sanvianos occupied the second floor. Below, the _piano nobile_ was
+rented by the proprietor of a great wine industry. It was evident that
+he was going out to dinner, for his dark blue brougham was waiting
+at the inner entrance. The horse, a fine sleek animal, was stamping
+impatiently, with ringing shoes, on the paved court. A flowering
+magnolia tree against one corner filled the thickening dusk with a heavy
+palpitating sweetness.
+
+Lavinia stayed for a long while at the ledge of her window. Her hair,
+which she wore braided in a smooth heavy rope, slid out and hung free.
+The brougham left, with a clatter of hoofs and a final clang of the
+great iron-bound door on the street; above, white stars grew visible in
+a blue dust. She dressed slowly, changing from one plain gown to another
+hardly less simple. Before the mirror, in an unsatisfactory lamplight,
+she studied her appearance in comparison with Gheta's.
+
+She lacked the latter's lustrous pallor, the petal-like richness of
+Gheta's skin. Lavinia's cheeks bore a perceptible flush, which she
+detested and tried vainly to mask with powder. Her eyes, a clear bluish
+gray, inherited from the Lombard strain in her mother, were not so much
+fancied as her sister's brown; but at least they were more uncommon and
+contrasted nicely with her straight dark bang. Her shoulders and arms
+she surveyed with frank healthy approbation. Now her hair annoyed
+her, swinging childishly about her waist, and she secured it in an
+instinctively effective coil on the top of her head. She decided to
+leave it there for dinner. Her mother was away for the night; and she
+knew that Gheta's sarcasm would only stir their father to a teasing
+mirth.
+
+Later, Gheta departed for a ball, together with the Marchese
+Sanviano--to be dropped at his club--and Lavinia was left alone. The
+scene in the court was repeated, but with less flourish than earlier in
+the evening. Gheta would be nominally in the charge of Anna Mantegazza;
+but Lavinia knew how laxly the American would hold her responsibility.
+She wished, moving disconsolately under high painted ceilings through
+the semi-gloom of still formal chambers, that she was a recognized
+beauty--free, like Gheta.
+
+The drawing-room, from which they had watched the afternoon procession,
+was in complete darkness, save for the luminous rectangle of the window
+they had occupied. Its drapery was still disarranged. Lavinia crossed
+the room and stood at the grille. The lights strung along the river,
+curving away like uniform pale bubbles, cast a thin illumination over
+the Lungarno, through which a solitary vehicle moved. Lavinia idly
+watched it approach, but her interest increased as it halted directly
+opposite where she stood. A man got quickly out--a lithe figure with a
+broad-brimmed hat slanted across his eyes. It was, she realized with
+an involuntary quickening of her blood, Abrego y Mochales. A second
+man followed, tendered him a curiously shaped object, and stood by
+the waiting cab while the bull-fighter walked deliberately forward. He
+stopped under the window and shifted the thing in his hands.
+
+A rich chord of strings vibrated through the night, another followed,
+and then a brief pattern of sound was woven from the serious notes of
+a guitar. Lavinia shrank back within the room--it was, incredibly, a
+serenade on the stolid Lungarno. It was for Gheta! The romance of the
+south of Spain had come to life under their window. A voice joined
+the instrument, melodious and melancholy, singing an air with little
+variation, but with an insistent burden of desire. The voice and the
+guitar mingled and fluctuated, drifting up from the pavement exotic and
+moving. Lavinia could comprehend but little of the Spanish:
+
+  _“I followed through the acacias,
+  But it was only the wind.
+  .... looked for you beyond the limes----“_
+
+The thrill at her heart deepened until tears wet her cheeks. It was for
+Gheta, but it overwhelmed Lavinia with a formless and aching emotion;
+it was for Gheta, but her response was instant and uncontrollable. It
+seemed to Lavinia that the sheer beauty of life, which had moved her
+so sharply, had been magnified unbearably; she had never dreamed of the
+possibilities of such ecstasy or such delectable grief.
+
+The song ended abruptly, with a sharp jarring note. The man by the
+carriage moved deferentially forward and took the guitar. She could
+see the minute pulsating sparks of cigarettes; heard a direction to the
+driver. Abrego y Mochales and the other got into the cab and it turned
+and shambled away. Lavinia Sanviano moved forward mechanically, gazing
+after the dark vanishing shape on the road. She was shaken, almost
+appalled, by the feeling that stirred her. A momentary terror of living
+swept over her; the thrills persisted; her hands were icy cold. She had
+been safely a child until now, when she had lost that small security,
+and gained--what?
+
+She studied herself, clad in her coarse nightgown with narrow lace, in
+her inadequate mirror. The color had left her cheeks and her eyes shone
+darkly from shadows. “Lavinia Sanviano!” she spoke aloud, with the
+extraordinary sensation of addressing, in her reflection, a stranger.
+She could never, never wear her hair down again, she thought with an odd
+pang.
+
+II
+
+Gheta invariably took breakfast in her room. It was a larger chamber by
+far than Lavinia's, toward the Via Garibaldi. A thick white bearskin was
+spread by the canopied bed, an elaborate dressing table stood between
+long windows drawn with ruffled pink silk, while the ceiling bore a
+scaling ottocento frescoing of garlanded cupids. She was sitting in bed,
+the chocolate pot on a painted table at her side, when Lavinia entered.
+
+A maid was putting soft paper in the sleeves of Gheta's ball dress, and
+Lavinia, finding an unexpected reluctance to proceed with what she had
+come to say, watched the servant's deft care.
+
+“Mochales was here last night,” Lavinia finally remarked abruptly--“that
+is he stood on the street and serenaded you.”
+
+Gheta put her cup down with a clatter.
+
+“How charming!” she exclaimed. “And I missed it for an insufferable
+affair. He stood under the window--”
+
+“With a guitar,” Lavinia proceeded evenly. “It was very beautiful.”
+
+“Heavens! Bembo's going to fetch him to the Guarinis' sale, and I forgot
+and promised Anna Mantegazza to drive out to Arcetri! But Anna won't
+miss this. It was really a very pretty compliment.”
+
+She spoke with a trivial satisfaction that jarred painfully on Lavinia's
+memory of the past night. Gheta calmly accepted the serenade as another
+tribute to her beauty; Lavinia could imagine what Anna Mantegazza and
+her sister would say, and they both seemed commonplace--even a little
+vulgar--to her acutely sensitive being. She suddenly lost her desire
+to resemble Gheta; her sister diminished in her estimation. The elder,
+Lavinia realized with an unsparing detachment, was enveloped in a petty
+vanity acquired in an atmosphere of continuous flattery; it had chilled
+her heart.
+
+The Guarinis, who had been overtaken by misfortune, and whose household
+goods were, being disposed of at public sale, occupied a large gloomy
+floor on the Via Cavour. The rooms were crowded by their friends and the
+merely curious; the carpets were protected by a temporary covering; and
+all the furnishings, the chairs and piano, pictures, glass and bijoux,
+bore gummed and numbered labels.
+
+The sale was progressing in one of the larger salons, but the crowd
+circulated in a slow solid undulation through every room. Gheta and Anna
+Mantegazza had sought the familiar comfortable corner of an entresol,
+and were seated. Lavinia was standing tensely, with a laboring breast,
+when Bembo suddenly appeared with the man whom he had called the Flower
+of Spain.
+
+“The Contessa Mantegazza,” Bembo said suavely, “Signorina Sanviano, this
+is Abrego y Mochales.”
+
+The bull-fighter bowed with magnificent flexibility. A hot resentment
+possessed Lavinia at Bembo's apparent ignoring of her; but he had not
+seen her at first and hastened to repair his omission. Lavinia inclined
+her head stiffly. An increasing confusion enveloped her, but she forced
+herself to gaze directly into Mochales' still black eyes. His face, she
+saw, was gaunt, the ridges of his skull apparent under the bronzed skin.
+His hair, worn in a queue, was pinned in a flat disk on his head, and
+small gold loops had been riveted in his ears; but these peculiarities
+of garb were lost in the man's intense virility, his patent brute
+force. His fine perfumed linen, the touch of scarlet at his waist,
+his extremely high-heeled patent-leather boots under soft uncreased
+trousers, served only to emphasize his resolute metal--they resembled an
+embroidered and tasseled scabbard that held a keen, thin and dangerous
+blade.
+
+Anna Mantegazza extended her hand in the American fashion, and Gheta
+smiled from--Lavinia saw--her best facial angle. The Spaniard regarded
+Gheta Sanviano so fixedly that after a moment she turned, in a species
+of constraint, to Anna. The latter spoke with her customary facility and
+the man responded gravely.
+
+They stood a little aside from Lavinia; she only partly heard their
+remarks, but she saw that Abrego y Mochales' attention never strayed
+from her sister. Vicariously it made her giddy. The man absolutely
+summed up all that Lavinia had dreamed of a romantic and masterful
+personage. She felt convinced that he had destroyed her life's
+happiness--no other man could ever appeal to her now; none other could
+satisfy the tumult he had aroused in her. This, she told herself,
+desperately miserable, was love.
+
+Gheta spoke of her, for the three turned to regard her. She met their
+scrutiny with a doubtful half smile, which vanished as Anna Mantegazza
+made a light comment upon her hair being so newly up. Lavinia detested
+the latter with a sudden and absurd intensity. She saw Anna, with a
+veiled glance at Gheta, make an apology and leave to join an eddy of
+familiars that had formed in the human stream sweeping by. Mochales
+stood very close to her sister, speaking seriously, while Gheta
+nervously fingered the short veil hanging from her gay straw hat.
+
+A familiar kindly voice sounded suddenly in Lavinia's ears, and Cesare
+Orsi joined her. He was about to move forward toward Gheta; but, before
+he could attract her attention, she disappeared in the crowd with the
+Spaniard.
+
+“Who was it?” he inquired. “He resembles a juggler.”
+
+Lavinia elaborately masked her hot resentment at this fresh stupidity.
+She must not, she felt, allow Orsi to discover her feeling for Abrego
+y Mochales; that was a secret she must keep forever from the profane
+world. She would die, perhaps at a terribly advanced age, with it locked
+in her heart. But if Gheta married him she would go into a convent.
+
+“A bull-fighter, I believe,” she said carelessly.
+
+“In other words, a brute,” Orsi continued. “Such men are not fit for the
+society of--of your sister. One would think his mere presence would make
+her ill.... Yet she seemed quite pleased.”
+
+“Strange!” Lavinia spoke with innocent eyes.
+
+It was like turning a knife in her wound to agree apparently with Cesare
+Orsi--rather, she wanted to laugh at him coldly and leave him standing
+alone; but she must cultivate her defenses. There was, too, a sort of
+negative pleasure in misleading the banker, a sort of torment not unlike
+that enjoyed by the early martyrs.
+
+Cesare Orsi regarded her with new interest and approbation.
+
+“You're a sensible girl,” he proclaimed; “and extremely pretty in the
+bargain.” He added this in an accent of profound surprise, as if she had
+suddenly grown presentable under his eyes. “In some ways,” he went on,
+gathering conviction, “you are as handsome as Gheta.”
+
+“Thank you, Signor Orsi,” Lavinia responded with every indication of a
+modesty, which, in fact, was the indifference of a supreme contempt.
+
+“I have been blind,” he asseverated, vivaciously gesticulating with his
+thick hands.
+
+Lavinia studied him with a remote young brutality, from his fluffy
+disarranged hair, adhering to his wet brow, to his extravagantly pointed
+shoes. The ridiculous coral charm hanging from his heavy watch chain, a
+violent green handkerchief, an insufferable cameo pin--all contributed
+pleasurably to the lowering of her opinion of him.
+
+“I must find Gheta,” she pronounced, suddenly aware of her isolation
+with Cesare Orsi in the crowd, and of curious glances. Orsi immediately
+took her arm, but she eluded him. “Go first, please; we can get through
+sooner that way.”
+
+They progressed from room to room, thoroughly exploring the dense throng
+about the auctioneer, but without finding either Gheta, Anna Mantegazza
+or the bull-fighter.
+
+“I can't think how she could have forgotten me!” Lavinia declared with
+increasing annoyance. “It's clear that they have all gone.”
+
+“Don't agitate yourself,” Cesare Orsi begged. “Sanviano will be
+absolutely contented to have you in my care. I am delighted. You shall
+go home directly in my carriage.” He conducted her, with a show of form
+that in any one else or at another time she would have enjoyed hugely,
+to the street, where he handed her into an immaculately glossy and
+corded victoria, drawn by a big stamping bay, and stood with his hat off
+until she had rolled away.
+
+It was comfortable in the luxuriously upholstered seat and, in spite of
+herself, Lavinia sank back with a contented sigh. There was in its case
+a gilt hand mirror, into which she peered, and a ledge that pulled out,
+with a crystal box for cigarettes and a spirit lighter. The Sanvianos
+had only a landaulet, no longer in its first condition; and Lavinia
+wondered why Gheta, who adored ease, had been so long in securing for
+herself such comforts as Orsi's victoria.
+
+They swept smoothly on rubber tires into the Lungarno and rapidly
+approached her home. The carriage stopped before the familiar white
+façade, built of marble in the pseudo-severity of the early nineteenth
+century, and the porter swung open the great iron gate to the courtyard.
+Lavinia mounted the square white shaft of the stairs to the Sanvianos'
+floor with a deepening sense of injury. She would make it plain to Gheta
+that she was no longer a child to be casually overlooked.
+
+A small room, used in connection with the dining room for coffee and
+smoking, gave directly on the hall; there she saw her father sitting,
+with his hat still on, his face stamped with an almost comical dismay,
+and holding an unlighted cigar.
+
+“Gheta left me at the Guarinis',” Lavinia halted impetuously. “If it
+hadn't been for Signor Orsi I shouldn't be here yet; I was completely
+ignored.”
+
+“Heavens!” her father exclaimed, waving her away. “Another feminine
+catastrophe! Go to your sister and mother. My head is in a whirl.”
+
+Her mother, then, had returned. She went forward and was suddenly
+startled by hearing Gheta's voice rise in a wail of despairing misery.
+She hurried forward to her sister's room. Gheta, fully dressed, was
+prostrate, face down, upon her bed, shaken by a strangled sobbing that
+at intervals rose to a thin hysterical scream. The Marchesa Sanviano,
+still in her traveling suit and close-fitting black hat, sat by
+her elder daughter's side, trying vainly to calm the tumult. In the
+background the maid, her face streaming with sympathetic tears, was
+hovering distractedly with a jar of volatile salts.
+
+“Mamma,” Lavinia demanded, torn by extravagant fears, “what has
+happened?”
+
+The marchesa momentarily turned a concerned countenance.
+
+“Your sister,” she said seriously, “has found some wrinkles on her
+forehead.”
+
+Lavinia with difficulty restrained a sharp giggle. Gheta's grief and
+their mother's anxiety at first seemed so foolishly disproportionate
+to their cause. Then a realization of what such an occurrence meant to
+Gheta dawned upon her. To an acknowledged beauty like Gheta Sanviano
+the marks of Time were an absolute tragedy; they threatened her on every
+plane of her being.
+
+“But when--” Lavinia began.
+
+“They--Anna Mantegazza and she--went to the dressing room at the
+Guarinis', where, it seems, Anna discovered them--sympathetically, of
+course.”
+
+Gheta's sobbing slowly subsided under the marchesa's urgent plea that
+unrestrained emotion would only deepen her trouble. She did not appear
+at dinner; and afterward the marchese, his wife and Lavinia sat wrapped
+in a gloomy silence. The marchesa was still handsome, in spite of
+increasing weight. The gray gaze inherited by Lavinia had escaped the
+parent; her eyes were soft and dense, like brown velvet. She was a woman
+of decision and now she brought her hands smartly together.
+
+“We have waited too long with Gheta; we should not have counted so
+confidently on her beauty; time flies so treacherously. She must marry
+as soon as possible.”
+
+“Thank God, there's Cesare Orsi!” her husband responded.
+
+Lavinia was gazing inward at the secretly enshrined image of the Flower
+of Spain.
+
+III
+
+Gheta Sanviano often passed a night at the Mantegazzas' villa on the
+Height of Castena, a long mile from the city.
+
+Lavinia, too, knew the dwelling well, for Sanviano and Pier Mantegazza
+had been intimate from their similar beginnings, and she had played
+there as a child. However, she had never been regularly asked with
+Gheta; and when that occurred--Gheta indifferently delivered Anna
+Mantegazza's message--and her mother acquiesced, Lavinia had a renewed
+sense of her growing importance.
+
+She went out early, in the heat of midday, a time that fitted best with
+the involved schedule of the Sanvianos' single equipage--Anna would take
+her sister directly from a luncheon at the Ginoris'. Lavinia looked with
+mingled anticipation and relief at the approaching graceful façade added
+scarcely a hundred and fifty years before to the otherwise somber abode
+of the Mantegazzas, first established in the twelfth century.
+
+The villa stood on an eminence, circled by austere pines, and terraced
+with innumerable vegetable gardens and frugally planted olives. The road
+mounted abruptly, turned under a frowning wall incongruously topped with
+delicately painted urns, and doubled across the massive iron-bound door
+that closed the arched entrance. Within, an immensely high timbered hall
+was pleasantly cool and dark after the white blaze without. It was bare
+of furnishing except for a number of rude oak settles against the naked
+stone walls. It had been a place of fear to Lavinia when a child; and
+even now she left it with a sense of relief for the modernized interior
+beyond.
+
+Pier Mantegazza was standing before a high inclined table, which bore
+a number of blackened and shapeless medallions. He was a famous
+numismatic--a tall stooping man, slightly lame, and enveloped in a
+premature gray ill health that resembled clinging cobwebs. He bent and
+brushed Lavinia's forehead with his crisp mustache, and then returned to
+the delicate manipulation of a magnifying glass and a small blue bottle
+of acid. She left him for a deep chair and a surprising French romance
+by Remy de Gourmont. At a long philosophical dialogue the book drooped,
+and she thought of Anna Mantegazza and her husband.
+
+She wondered whether they were happy. But she decided, measuring
+that condition solely by her own requirement, that such a state was
+impossible for them. It had certainly been a marriage for money and
+position; prior to the ceremony the Casa Mantegazza had been closed
+for years, and Pier Mantegazza occupied a small establishment near the
+Military Hospital, on the Via San Gallo. Anna Cane had arrived in Rome,
+without family or credentials, and unknown to the American Embassy
+other than by amazing deposits at the best banks. But she did have, in
+addition to this, a pungent charm and undeniable force and good taste.
+It was said that the moment she had seen Mantegazza's villa she had
+decided to possess it, even at the price of its sere withdrawn holder.
+
+She had gone at once into the best Florentine and Roman society.
+That was ten years before, but Lavinia realized that she had never
+successfully assimilated the Italian social formula. She mixed the
+most diverse elements of their world willfully and found enjoyment in
+bringing about amusing situations. She seemed devoid of the foundations
+of proper caution; in fact, she mocked at them openly. And if she
+had not been a model Catholic, and herself above the slightest moral
+question, even Mantegazza could not have carried her among his own
+circles. As it was, people flocked to her elaborate parties, torn
+between the hope of being amazed and the fear that they should furnish
+the hub of the occasion.
+
+Gheta and her hostess arrived later. The former, it appeared to Lavinia,
+looked disconcerted; and it was evident that she had been remonstrating
+with Anna Mantegazza. The other laughed provokingly.
+
+“Nonsense!” she declared. “It was too good to miss; besides, you're an
+old campaigner.”
+
+A stair of flagging, turning sharply round a stone pillar, led
+incongruously from the light French furnishings to the chamber where
+Lavinia was to sleep. A Renaissance bed, made of thick quilting directly
+upon the floor, was covered with gilt ecclesiastical embroidery; and a
+movable tub stood in a stone corner. The narrow deep windows overlooked
+Florence, a somber expanse of roofing; and, coming rapidly toward
+the villa, Lavinia could see a tall dogcart, with a groom and two
+passengers. They were men; and, as they drew nearer, Lavinia--with a
+sudden pounding of her heart--realized the cause of the slight friction
+between the two women. The cart bore Cesare Orsi, and Mochales the
+bull-fighter, the Flower of Spain. It was a part of Anna Mantegazza's
+humor that the men, so essentially antagonistic, should arrive together
+clinging precariously on the high insecure trap.
+
+Tea was served at five on the terrace, and Lavinia dressed with minute
+care. Gheta, she knew, had brought a new lavender lawn with little gold
+velvet buttons and lace; while she had nothing but the familiar coarse
+white mull. But she had fresh ribbons and she gazed with satisfaction at
+her firm, faintly rosy countenance. She would have no wrinkles for years
+to come. However, she thought, with a return to her sense of tragic
+gloom, such considerations were of little moment, as Abrego y Mochales
+would scarcely be aware of her existence; he would never know....
+Perhaps, years after--
+
+She purposely delayed her appearance on the terrace until the others
+had assembled, and then quietly took possession of a chair. Cesare Orsi
+greeted her with effusive warmth, the Spaniard bowed ceremoniously.
+A wide prospect of countryside flowed away in innumerable hills and
+valleys, clothed in the silvery smoke of olives and in green-black
+pines; below, a bank of cherry trees were in bloom. The air was sweet
+and still and full of a warm radiance.
+
+Lavinia luxuriated in her unhappiness. Mochales, she decided, must
+be the handsomest man in existence. His unchanging gravity fascinated
+her--the man's face, his voice, his dignified gestures, were all steeped
+in a splendid melancholy.
+
+“I am a peasant,” he said, apparently addressing them all, but with his
+eyes upon Gheta, “from Estremadura, in the mountains. The life there was
+very hard, and that was fortunate for me; the food was scarce, and that
+was good too. If I ate like the grandees a bull would end me in the hot
+sun of the first _fiesta_; I'd double up like a pancake. I must work all
+the time--run for miles and play _pelota_.”
+
+Lavinia was possessed by a new contempt for her kind, which she centered
+upon Orsi, clumsy and stupidly smiling. It was clear that he couldn't
+run a mile; in fact, he admitted that he detested all exercise. How
+absurd he looked in his tight plaited jacket! It appeared that he was
+always perspiring; a crime, she felt sure--with entire disregard of its
+fatal consequences--that Mochales never committed.
+
+“A friend of ours--it was Bembo--said that he saw you at San Sebastian
+with your King,” Anna Mantegazza put in.
+
+“Why not? But Alphonso is a fine boy; he understands the business of
+royalty. Every year I dedicate a magnificent bull to the King on his
+name day.”
+
+“Will you dedicate one to me?” Gheta asked carelessly.
+
+“The best in Andalusia,” he responded with fire.
+
+Cesare Orsi made a slight sharp exclamation, and Lavinia's heart beat
+painfully. The former turned to her with sudden determination.
+
+“Were you comfortable in my carriage,” he demanded, “and fetched home at
+a smart pace?” Lavinia thanked him.
+
+“You are always so quiet,” he complained. “I'm certain there's a great
+deal in that wise young head worth hearing.”
+
+“Lavinia is still in the schoolroom,” Gheta explained brutally.
+“Yesterday she put up her hair, to-day Anna Mantegazza invites her, and
+we have an effect.”
+
+Anna Mantegazza turned to the younger with a new veiled scrutiny. Her
+gaze rested for an instant on Orsi and then moved contemplatively to
+Gheta and Abrego y Mochales. It was evident that her thoughts were very
+busy; a faint sparkle appeared in her eyes, a fresh vivacity animated
+her manner. Suddenly she included Lavinia in her remarks; she put
+queries to the girl patently intended to draw her out. Gheta grew uneasy
+and then cross.
+
+“I'm sick of sitting here,” she declared; “let's walk about. It's
+cooler, and Pier Mantegazza's place is always worth investigation.”
+ She rose and waited for Cesare Orsi, then led the small procession from
+under the striped tea kiosk down the terrace. The way grew steep and
+she rested a hand on Orsi's arm. Anna, Lavinia and the Flower of Spain
+followed together, until the first moved forward to join the leaders.
+Lavinia's gaze was obscured by a sort of warm mist; she clasped her
+hands to keep them from trembling. In a narrow flagged turn Mochales
+brushed her shoulder. He scarcely moved his eyes from Gheta's back. Once
+he gazed somberly at the girl beside him and she responded with a pale
+questioning smile. “I have had a great misfortune,” he told her.
+
+“Oh, I'm terribly, terribly sorry!”
+
+“I've lost a blessed coin that interceded for me since the first day I
+went in the bull ring. I'd give a thousand wax candles for its return.
+Now--when I need everything,” he continued as if to himself. “Your
+sister is beautiful,” he added abruptly. “Everybody thinks so,” Lavinia
+replied in a voice she endeavored to make enthusiastic. “She has had
+tens of admirers here and at Rome and Lucca.” There she knew she
+should stop; but she continued: “Cesare Orsi is very persistent and
+tremendously rich.”
+
+Mochales made a short unintelligible remark in Spanish. He twisted a
+cigarette with lightning-like rapidity and only one hand. Together
+they looked at Orsi's broad ungainly back, and the bull-fighter's lips
+tightened, exposing a glimmer of his immaculate teeth. They passed a
+neat whitewashed cottage, where an old couple stood bowing abjectly, and
+came on a series of long pale-brown buildings and walls.
+
+“The stables and barn,” Lavinia explained.
+
+Anna Mantegazza turned. “You may see something of interest here,” she
+called to Mochales.
+
+A series of steps, made by projecting stones, rose to the top of an
+eight-foot wall, up which Anna unexpectedly led the way. The wall was
+broad, afforded a comfortable footing, and enclosed a straw-littered
+yard. A number of doors led into a barn, and into one some men were
+urging refractory cattle. In a corner a small compact bull, with the
+rapierlike horns of the mountain breeds, was secured by a nose ring and
+a short chain; and to the latter the men turned when the other animals
+had been confined. Two threatened the animal with long poles, while a
+third unfastened the chain from the wall; and then all endeavored to
+drive him within. Abrego y Mochales stood easily above, watching these
+clumsy efforts.
+
+Suddenly the bull stopped, plunged his front hoofs into the soft mold
+of the stable yard and swept his head from side to side with a broken
+hoarse bellow. The men prodded him with urgent cries; but the bull
+suddenly whirled, snapping the poles, and there was an immediate
+scattering.
+
+The sight of the retreating forms apparently enraged the animal, for he
+charged with astonishing speed and barely missed horning the last man
+to fall over the barricade of a half door. Mochales smiled; he called
+familiarly to the bull. Then he stooped and vaulted lightly down into
+the yard. Lavinia gave a short exclamation; she was cold with fear. Orsi
+looked on without any emotion visible on his heavy face. Anna Mantegazza
+leaned forward, tense with interest. “_Bravo!_” she called.
+
+Gheta Sanviano smiled.
+
+The bull did not see Mochales at first, then the man cried tauntingly.
+The bull turned and stood with a lowered slowly-moving head, an uneasy
+tail. The Spaniard found a small milking stool and, carrying it to the
+middle of the yard, sat and comfortably rolled another cigarette. He was
+searching for a match when the bull moved forward a pace; he had found
+and was striking it when the bull increased his pace; he was guarding
+the flame about the cigarette's end when the animal broke into a
+charging run.
+
+The Flower of Spain inhaled a deep breath of smoke, which he expelled in
+deliberate globes.
+
+“Oh, don't! Oh----” Lavinia exclaimed, an arm before her eyes.
+
+Mochales shifted easily from his seat and apparently in the same instant
+the bull crushed the stool to splinters.
+
+“_Bravo! Bravo!_” Anna Mantegazza called again, and the man bowed until
+his extended hat rested on the ground.
+
+He straightened slowly; the bull whirled about and flung himself
+forward. Abrego y Mochales now had one of the discarded poles; and,
+waiting until the horns had almost encircled him, he vaulted lightly
+and beautifully over the running animal's shoulder. He waited again,
+avoiding the infuriated charge by a scant step; and, when the bull
+stopped he had Mochales' hat placed squarely upon his horns. Lavinia
+watched now in fascinated terror; she could not remove her gaze from the
+slim figure in the short black jacket and narrow crimson sash. At the
+moment when her tension relaxed, Mochales, with a short running step,
+vaulted cleanly to the top of the wall. His cigarette was still
+burning. She wanted desperately to add her praise to Anna Mantegazza's
+enthusiastic plaudits, Gheta's subtle smile; but only the utmost
+banalities occurred to her.
+
+They descended the stone steps and slowly mounted toward the house.
+Cesare Orsi resolutely dropped back beside Lavinia.
+
+“You are really superb!” he told her in his highly colored Neapolitan
+manner. “Most women--Anna Mantegazza for example--are like children
+before such a show as that back there. Your sister, too, was pleased; it
+appealed to her vanity, as the fellow intended it should. But you
+only disliked it.... I could see that in your attitude. It was the
+circus--that's all.”
+
+Lavinia gazed at him out of an unfathomable contempt. She thought: What
+a fool he is! It wasn't Abrego y Mochales' courage that appealed to
+her most, although that had afforded her an exquisite thrill, but his
+powerful grace, his absolute physical perfection. Orsi was heated again
+and his tie had slipped up over the back of his collar.
+
+She recalled the first talk she had had with him about Mochales and the
+manner in which she had masked her true feeling for the latter.
+
+How easy Orsi had been to mislead! Now she was seized by the desire to
+show him the actual state of her mind; she wanted, in bitter sentences,
+to tell him how infinitely superior the Spaniard was to such fat easy
+grubs as himself. She longed to make clear to him exactly what it was
+that women admired in men--romance and daring and splendid strength.
+It might suit Gheta, who had wrinkles, to encourage such men as Cesare
+Orsi; their wealth might appeal to cold and material minds, but they
+could never hope to inspire passion; no one would ever cherish for them
+a hopeless lifelong love.
+
+“Do you know,” Orsi declared with firm conviction, “you are even
+handsomer than your sister!”
+
+“Fool! fool! fool!” But she could not, of course, say a word of what was
+in her thoughts. She met his admiring gaze with a blank face, conscious
+of how utterly her exterior belied and hid the actual Lavinia Sanviano.
+She felt wearily old, sophisticated. In her room, dressing for the
+evening, she made up her mind that she must have a black dinner
+gown--later she would wear no other shade.
+
+IV
+
+Anna Mantegazza knocked and entered just as Lavinia had finished with
+her hair and was slipping into the familiar white dress. There had been,
+within the last few hours, a perceptible change in the former's attitude
+toward her. Lavinia realized that Anna Mantegazza regarded her with a
+new interest, a greater and more personal friendliness.
+
+“My dear Lavinia!” she exclaimed, critically overlooking the other's
+preparations. “You look very appealing--like a snowdrop; exactly.
+I should say the toilet for Sunday at the convent; but no longer
+appropriate outside. Really, I must speak to the marchesa--parents are
+so slow to see the differences in their own family. Gheta has been a
+little overemphasized.
+
+“I wonder,” she continued with glowing vivacity, “if you would allow
+me--I assure you it would give me the greatest pleasure in the world....
+Your figure is a thousand times better than mine; but, thank heaven, I'm
+still slender.... A little evening dress from Vienna! It should really
+do you very well. Will you accept it from me? I'd like to give you
+something, Lavinia; and it has never been out of its box.”
+
+She turned and was out of the room before Lavinia could reply. There was
+no reason why she shouldn't take a present from Anna--Pier Mantegazza
+and her father had been lifelong friends, and his wife was an intimate
+of the Sanvianos. It would not, probably, be black. It wasn't. Anna
+returned, followed by her maid, who bore carefully over her arm a
+shimmering mass of glowing pink.
+
+“Now!” Anna Mantegazza cried. “Your hair is very pretty, very
+original--but hardly for a dress by Verlat. Sara!”
+
+The maid moved quietly forward and directed an appraising gaze at
+Lavinia. She was a flat-hipped Englishwoman, with a cleft chin and
+enigmatic greenish eyes. “I see exactly, madame,” she assured Anna; and
+with her deft dry hands she took down Lavinia's laboriously arranged
+hair.
+
+She drew it back from the brow apparently as simply as before, twisted
+it into a low knot slightly eccentric in shape, and recut a bang.
+Lavinia's eyes seemed bluer, her delicate flush more elusive; the shape
+of her face appeared changed, it was more pointed and had a new willful
+charm.
+
+“The stockings,” Anna commanded.
+
+Dressed, Lavinia Sanviano stood curiously before the long mirror; she
+saw a fresh Lavinia that was yet the old; and she was absorbing her
+first great lesson in the magic of clothes. Verlat, a celebrated
+dressmaker, was typical of the Viennese spirit--the gown Lavinia wore
+resembled, in all its implications, an orchid. There was a whisper here
+of satin, a pale note of green, a promise of chiffon. Her crisp round
+shoulders were bare; her finely molded arms were clouded, as it were,
+with a pink mist; the skirt was full, incredibly airy; yet every
+movement was draped by a suave flowing and swaying.
+
+Lavinia recognized that she had been immensely enriched in effect; it
+was not a question of mere beauty--beauty here gave way to a more subtle
+and potent consideration. It was a potency which she instinctively
+shrank from probing. For a moment she experienced, curiously enough, a
+gust of passionate resentment, followed by a quickly passing melancholy,
+a faint regret.
+
+Anna Mantegazza and the maid radiated with satisfaction at the result of
+their efforts. The former murmured a phrase that bore Gheta's name, but
+Lavinia caught nothing else. The maid said:
+
+“Without a doubt, madame.”
+
+Lavinia lingered in her room, strangely reluctant to go down and see her
+sister. She was embarrassed by her unusual appearance and dreaded the
+prominence of the inevitable exclamations. At last she was obliged
+to proceed. The rest stood by the entrance of the dining room. Anna
+Mantegazza was laughing at a puzzled expression on the good-natured
+countenance of Cesare Orsi; Gheta was slowly waving a fan of gilded
+feathers; Abrego y Mochales was standing rigid and somberly handsome;
+and, as usual, Pier Mantegazza was late.
+
+Gheta Sanviano turned and saw Lavinia approaching, and the elder's
+face, always pale, grew suddenly chalky; it was drawn, and the wrinkles,
+carefully treated with paste, became visible about her eyes. Her hands
+shook a little as she took a step forward.
+
+“What does this mean, Lavinia?” she demanded. “Why did I know nothing
+about that dress?”
+
+“I knew nothing myself until a little bit ago,” Lavinia explained
+apologetically, filled with a formless pity for Gheta. “Isn't it pretty?
+Anna Mantegazza gave it to me.”
+
+She could see, over Gheta's shoulder, Cesare Orsi staring at her in
+idiotic surprise.
+
+“Don't you like it, Gheta?” Anna asked.
+
+Gheta Sanviano didn't answer, but closed her eyes for a moment in an
+effort to control the anger that shone in them. The silence deepened to
+constraint, and then she laughed lightly.
+
+“Quite a woman of fashion!” she observed of Lavinia. “Fancy! It's a pity
+that she must go back to the convent so soon.”
+
+Her eyes while she was speaking were directed toward Anna Mantegazza
+and the resentment changed to hatred. The other shrugged her shoulders
+indifferently and moved toward the dining room, catching Lavinia's arm
+in her own.
+
+Mantegazza entered at the soup and was seated on Gheta's right; Cesare
+Orsi was on Anna's left; and Lavinia sat between the two men, with
+Mochales opposite. Whatever change had taken place in her looks made
+absolutely no impression upon the latter; it was clear that he saw no
+one besides Gheta Sanviano.
+
+In the candlelight his face more than ever resembled bronze; his hair
+was dead-black; above the white linen his head was like a superb effigy
+of an earlier and different race from the others. It was almost savage
+in its still austerity. Cesare Orsi, too, said little, which was
+extraordinary for him. If Lavinia had made small mark on Mochales, at
+least she had overpowered the other to a ludicrous degree. It seemed
+that he had never before half observed her; he even muttered to himself
+and smiled uncertainly when she chanced to gaze at him.
+
+But what the others lacked conversationally Anna Mantegazza more than
+supplied; she was at her best, and that was very sparkling, touched with
+malice and understanding, and absolute independence. She insisted on
+including Lavinia in every issue. At first Lavinia was only confused by
+the attention pressed on her; she retreated, growing more inarticulate
+at every sally. Then she became easier; spurred partly by Gheta's
+direct unpleasantness and partly by the consciousness of her becoming
+appearance, she retorted with spirit; engaged Pier Mantegazza in a duet
+of verbal confetti. She gazed challengingly at Abrego y Mochales, but
+got no other answer than a grave perfunctory inclination.
+
+She thought of an alternative to the black gowns and unrelieved
+melancholy--she might become the gayest member of the gay Roman world,
+be known throughout Italy for her reckless exploits, her affairs and
+Vienna gowns, all the while hiding her passion for the Flower of Spain.
+It would be a vain search for forgetfulness, with an early death in an
+atmosphere of roses and champagne. Gheta was gazing at her so crossly
+that she took a sip of Mantegazza's brandy; it burned her throat
+cruelly, but she concealed the choking with a smile of high bravado.
+
+After dinner they progressed to a drawing-room that filled an entire end
+of the villa; it lay three steps below the hall, the imposing walls and
+floor covered with tapestries and richly dark rugs. Lavinia more than
+ever resembled an orchid, here in a gloom of towering trees curiously
+suggested by the draperies and space. She went forward with Anna
+Mantegazza to an amber blur of lamplight, the others following
+irregularly.
+
+Cesare Orsi sat at Lavinia's side, quickly finishing one long black
+cigar and lighting another; Pier Mantegazza and Mochales smoked
+cigarettes. Anna was smoking, but Gheta had refused. Lavinia's feeling
+for her sister had changed from pity to total indifference. The elder
+had been an overbearing and thoughtless superior; and now, when Lavinia
+felt in some subtle inexplicable manner that Gheta was losing rank, her
+store of sympathy was small. Lavinia hoped that she would marry Orsi
+immediately and leave the field free for herself. She wondered whether
+her father would buy her a dress by Verlat.
+
+“Honestly,” Orsi murmured, “more beautiful than your--”
+
+She stopped him with an impatient gesture, wondering what Mochales was
+saying to Gheta. A possibility suddenly filled her with dread--it was
+evident that the Spaniard was growing hourly more absorbed in Gheta, and
+the latter might----Lavinia could not support the possibility of Abrego
+y Mochales married to her sister. But, she reassured herself, there was
+little danger of that--Gheta would never make a sacrifice for emotion;
+she would be sure of the comfortable material thing, and now more than
+ever.
+
+Anna Mantegazza moved to a piano, which, in the obscurity, she began to
+play. The notes rose deliberate and melodious. Gheta Sanviano told Orsi:
+
+“That's Iris. Do you remember, we heard it at the Pergola in the
+winter?”
+
+“Do go over to her,” Lavinia whispered.
+
+He rose heavily and went to Gheta's side, and Lavinia waited expectantly
+for Mochales to change too. The Spaniard shifted, but it was toward the
+piano, where he stood with the rosy reflection of his cigarette on a
+moody countenance. It was Pier Mantegazza who sat beside her, with a
+quizzical expression on his long gray visage. He said something to her
+in Latin, which she only partly understood, but which alluded to the
+changing of water into wine.
+
+“I am a subject of jest,” he continued in Italian, “because I prefer
+water.”
+
+She smiled with polite vacuity, wondering what he meant.
+
+“You always satisfied me, Lavinia, with your dark smooth plait and white
+simplicity; you were cool and refreshing. Now they have made you only
+disturbing. I suppose it was inevitable, and with you the change will be
+temporary.”
+
+“I'll never let my hair down again,” she retorted. “I've settled that
+with Gheta. Mother didn't care, really.”
+
+She was annoyed by the implied criticism, his entire lack of response to
+her new being. He had grown blind staring at his stupid old coins.
+
+A step sounded behind her; she turned hopefully, but it was only Cesare
+Orsi.
+
+“The others have gone outside,” he told her, and she noticed that the
+piano had stopped.
+
+Mantegazza rose and bowed in mock serious formality, at which Lavinia
+shrugged an impatient shoulder and walked with Orsi across the room and
+out upon the terrace.
+
+Florence had sunk into a dark chasm of night, except for the curving
+double row of lights that marked the Lungarno and the indifferent
+illumination of a few principal squares. The stars seemed big and near
+in deep blue space. Orsi was standing very close to her, and she moved
+away; but he followed.
+
+“Lavinia,” he muttered, and suddenly his arm was about her waist.
+
+She leaned back, pushing with both hands against his chest; but he
+swept her irresistibly up to him and kissed her clumsily. A cold
+rage possessed her. She stopped struggling; yet there was no need to
+continue--he released her immediately and opened a stammering apology.
+
+“I am a madman,” he admitted abjectly--“a little animal that ought to
+be shot. I don't know what came over me; my head was in a carnival. You
+must forgive or I shall be a maniac, I----”
+
+She turned and walked swiftly into the house and mounted to her
+room. All the pleasure she had had in the evening, the Viennese gown,
+evaporated, left her possessed by an utter loathing of self. Now, in the
+mirror, she seemed hateful, the clouded chiffon and airy clinging satin
+unspeakable. Looking back out of the dim glass was a stranger who had
+betrayed and cheapened her. Her pure serenity revolted against the
+currents of life sweeping down upon her, threatening to inundate her.
+
+She unhooked the Verlat gown with trembling fingers and--once more in
+simple white--dropped into a deep chair, where she cried with short
+painful inspirations, her face pressed against her arm. Her emotion
+subsided, changed to a formless dread, and again to a black sense
+of helplessness. Suddenly she rose and mechanically shook loose
+her hair--footsteps were approaching. Her sister entered, pale and
+vindictive.
+
+“You are to be congratulated,” she proceeded thinly; “you made a success
+with everybody--that is, with all but Mochales. It was for him, wasn't
+it? You were very clever, but you failed ridiculously.”
+
+Lavinia made no reply.
+
+“I hope Mochales excuses you because of your greenness.”
+
+“Youth isn't any longer your crime,” Lavinia retorted at last.
+
+“That dress--it would suit Anna Mantegazza; but you looked only
+indecent.”
+
+“Perhaps you're right, Gheta,” Lavinia said unexpectedly. “I'm going to
+bed now, please.”
+
+Her balance, restored by sleep, was once more normal when she returned
+to the Lungarno. It was again late afternoon, the daily procession was
+returning from the Cascine, and Gheta was at the window, looking coldly
+down. The Marchesa Sanviano was knitting at prodigious speed a shapeless
+gray garment. They all turned when a servant entered:
+
+Signer Orsi wished to see the marchese.
+
+This unusual formality on the part of Cesare Orsi could have but one
+purpose, and Lavinia and their mother gazed significantly at the elder
+sister.
+
+“The marchese is dressing,” his wife directed.
+
+She drew a long breath of relief and nodded over her needles. Gheta
+raised her chin; her lips bore the half-contemptuous expression that
+lately had become habitual; her eyes were half closed.
+
+Lavinia sat with her hands loose in her lap. She was wondering whether
+or not, should she make a vigorous protest, they would send her back
+to the convent. The Verlat gown was carefully hung in her closet. Last
+night she had been idiotic.
+
+The Marchese Sanviano appeared hurriedly and alone; his tie was crooked
+and his expression very much disturbed. His wife looked up, startled.
+
+“What!” she demanded directly. “Didn't he----”
+
+“Yes,” Sanviano replied, “he did! He wants to marry Lavinia.”
+
+Lavinia half rose, with a horrified protest; Gheta seemed suddenly
+turned to stone; the knitting fell unheeded from the marchesa's lap.
+Sanviano spread out his hands helplessly.
+
+“Well,” he demanded, “what could I do?... A man with Orsi's blameless
+character and the Orsi banks!”
+
+V
+
+The house to which Cesare Orsi took Lavinia was built over the rim of a
+small steep island in the Bay of Naples, opposite Castellamare. It
+faced the city, rising in an amphitheater of bright stucco and almond
+blossoms, across an expanse of glassy and incredibly blue water. It
+was evening, the color of sky and bay was darkening, intensified by a
+vaporous rosy column where the ascending smoke of Vesuvius held the last
+upflung glow of the vanished sun. Lavinia could see from her window the
+pale distant quiver of the electric lights springing up along the Villa
+Nazionale.
+
+The dwelling itself drew a long irregular façade of white marble on
+its abrupt verdant screen--a series of connected pavilions, galleries,
+pergolas, belvedere, flowering walls and airy chambers. There were
+tesselated remains from the time of the great pleasure-saturated Roman
+emperors, a later distinctly Moorish influence, quattrocento-painted
+eaves, an eighteenth-century sodded court, and a smoking room with the
+startling colored glass of the nineteenth.
+
+The windows of Lavinia's room had no sashes; they were composed of a
+double marble arch, supported in the center by a slender twisted marble
+column, with Venetian blinds. She stood in the opening, gazing fixedly
+over the water turning into night. She could hear, from the room beyond,
+her husband's heavy deliberate footfalls; and the sound filled her with
+a formless resentment. She wished to be justifiably annoyed by them,
+or him; but there was absolutely no cause. Cesare Orsi's character
+and disposition were alike beyond reproach--transparent and heroically
+optimistic. Since their marriage she had been insolent, she had been
+both captious and continuously indifferent, without unsettling the
+determined eager good-nature with which he met her moods.
+
+During the week he went by launch into Naples in the interests of his
+banking, and did not return for luncheon; and she had long uninterrupted
+hours for the enjoyment of her pleasant domain. Altogether, his demands
+upon her were reasonable to the point of self-effacement. He laughed
+a great deal; this annoyed her youthful gravity and she remonstrated
+sharply more than once, but he only leaned back and laughed harder. Then
+she would either grow coldly disdainful or leave the room, followed by
+the echo of his merriment. There was something impervious, like armor,
+in his excellent humor. Apparently she could not get through it to wound
+him as she would have liked; and she secretly wondered.
+
+He was prodigal in his generosity--the stores of the Via Roma were
+prepared to empty themselves at her desire. Cesare Orsi's wife was
+a figure of importance in Naples. She had been made welcome by the
+Neapolitan society--lawn fêtes had been given in villas under the
+burnished leaves of magnolias on the height of Vomero. The Cavaliere
+Nelli, Orsi's cousin and a retired colonel of Bersaglieri, entertained
+lavishly at dinner on the terrace of Bertolini's; she went out to old
+houses looking through aged and riven pines at the sea.
+
+She would have enjoyed all this hugely if she had not been married to
+Orsi; but the continual reiteration of the fact that she was Orsi's wife
+filled her with an accumulating resentment. The implication that she
+had been exceedingly fortunate became more than she could bear. The
+consequence was that, as soon as it could be managed, she ceased going
+about.
+
+She was now at the window, immersed in a melancholy sense of total
+isolation; the water stirring along the masonry below, a call from a
+shadowy fishing boat dropping down the bay, filled her with longing for
+the cheerful existence of the Lungarno. She had had a letter from Gheta
+that morning, the first from her sister since she had left Florence,
+brief but without any actual expression of ill will. After all was said,
+she had brought Gheta a great disappointment; if she had been in the
+elder's place probably she would have behaved no better.... It occurred
+to her to ask Gheta to Naples. At least then she would have some one
+with whom to recall the pleasant trifles of past years. She would
+have liked to ask Anna Mantegazza, too; but this she knew was
+impossible--Gheta had not forgiven Anna for her part on the night that
+had resulted in Orsi's proposal for Lavinia.
+
+She wondered, more obscurely, whether Abrego y Mochales was still in
+Florence. He loomed at the back of her thoughts, inscrutably dark and
+romantic. It piqued her that he had not made the slightest response to
+her palpable admiration. But he had been tremendously stirred by Gheta,
+who was never touched by such emotions.
+
+A desire to see Mochales grew insidiously out of her speculations; a
+desire to talk about him, hear his name. Lavinia deliberately shut her
+eyes to the fact that this last became her principal reason for wishing
+to see Gheta.
+
+She told Cesare, with a diffidence which she was unable to overcome,
+that she had written asking her sister for a visit. Seemingly he didn't
+hear her. They were at breakfast, on the wine-red tiling of a pergola
+by the water, and he had shaken his fist, with a rueful curse, in the
+direction of Naples. Before him lay an open letter with an engraved page
+heading.
+
+“I said,” Lavinia repeated impatiently, “that Gheta will probably be
+here the last of the week.”
+
+“The sacred camels!” Orsi exclaimed; then: “Oh, Gheta--good!” But he
+fell immediately into an angry reverie. “If I dared--” he muttered.
+
+“What has stirred you up so?”
+
+“It's difficult to explain to any one not born in Naples. Here, you see,
+all is not in order, like Florence; we have had a stormy time between
+brigands and secret factions and foreign rulers; and certain societies
+sprang up, necessary once, but now--when one still exists--a source of
+bribery and nuisance. This letter, for example, congratulates me on the
+possession of a charming bride; it expresses the devotion of a hidden
+organization, but points out that in order to guarantee your safety in
+a city where the guards are admittedly insufficient it will be necessary
+for me to forward two thousand lire at once.”
+
+“You will, of course, ignore it.”
+
+“I will certainly send the money at once.”
+
+“What a cowardly attitude!” Lavinia declared contemptuously. “You allow
+yourself to be blackmailed like a common criminal.”
+
+Orsi laughed, his equilibrium quickly restored.
+
+“I warned you that a stranger could not understand,” he reminded her.
+“If the money weren't sent, in ten days or two weeks perhaps, there
+would be a little accident on the Chiaja--your carriage would be run
+into; you would be upset, confused, angry. There would be profuse
+apologies, investigation, perhaps arrests; but nothing would come of it.
+If the money was still held back something a little more serious would
+occur. Nothing really dangerous, you understand; but finally the
+two thousand lire would be gladly paid over and the accidents would
+mysteriously cease.”
+
+“An outrage!” Lavinia asserted, and Orsi nodded.
+
+“If you had an enemy,” he continued, “you could have her gown ruined in
+the foyer of the San Carlos; if it were a man he would be caught at his
+club with an uncomfortable ace in his cuff. At least so I'm assured.
+I haven't had any reason to look the society up yet.” He laughed
+prodigiously. “Even murders are ascribed to it. Careful, Cesare, or a
+new valet will cut your throat some fine morning and your widow walk
+away with a more graceful man!”
+
+“Your jokes are so stupid.” Lavinia shrugged her shoulders.
+
+He laid the letter on the table's edge and a wandering air bore it
+slanting to the floor, but he promptly recovered it.
+
+“That must go in the safe,” he ended; “it is well to have a slight grasp
+on those gentlemen.”
+
+He rose; and a few minutes later Lavinia saw his trim brown launch,
+with its awning and steersman in gleaming white, rushing through the bay
+toward Naples.
+
+VI
+
+The basin from which the launch plied lay inside a seawall inclosing a
+small placid rectangle with a walk all about and iron benches. Steps at
+the back, guarded by two great Pompeian sandstone urns, and pressed by
+a luxuriant growth, led up to the villa. Gheta looked curiously about
+as she stepped from the launch and went forward with her brother-in-law.
+Lavinia followed, with Gheta's maid and a porter in the rear.
+
+Lavinia realized that her sister looked badly; in the unsparing blaze
+of midday the wrinkles about her eyes were apparent, and they had
+multiplied. Although it was past the first of June, Gheta was wearing
+a linen suit of last year; and--as her maid unpacked--Lavinia saw the
+familiar pink tulle and the lavender gown with the gold velvet buttons.
+
+“Your dressmaker is very late,” she observed thoughtlessly.
+
+A slow flush spread over the other's countenance; she did not reply
+immediately and Lavinia would have given a great deal to unsay her
+period.
+
+“It isn't that,” Gheta finally explained; “the family find that I am too
+expensive. You see, I haven't justified their hopes and they have been
+cutting down.”
+
+Her voice was thin, metallic; her features had sharpened like folded
+paper creased between the fingers.
+
+“It's very good form here,” she went on, dancing about her room. It was
+hardly more than a marble gallery, the peristyle choked with flowering
+bushes, camellias and althea and hibiscus, barely furnished, and filled
+with drifting perfumes and the savor of the sea. “What a shame that
+these things must be got at a price!”
+
+Lavinia glanced at her sharply; until the present moment that would have
+expressed her own attitude, but said by Gheta it seemed a little crude.
+It was, anyhow, painfully obvious, and she had no intention of showing
+Gheta the true state of her being.
+
+“Isn't that so of everything--worth having?” she asked, adding the
+latter purely as a counter.
+
+The elder drew up her fine shoulders.
+
+“That's very courageous of you,” she admitted--“especially since
+everybody knew your opinion of Orsi. Heaven knows you made no effort to
+disguise your feeling to others.”
+
+Lavinia smiled calmly; Cesare was really very thoughtful, and she said
+so. Gheta replied at a sudden tangent:
+
+“Mochales has been a great nuisance.”
+
+Lavinia was gazing through an opening in the leaves at the sparkling
+blue plane of the bay. She made no movement, aware of her sister's
+unsparing curiosity turned upon her, and only said:
+
+“Really?”
+
+“Spaniards are so tempestuous,” Gheta continued; “he's been whispering
+a hundred mad schemes in my ear. He gave up an important engagement in
+Madrid rather than leave Florence. I have been almost stirred by him, he
+is so slender and handsome.
+
+“Simply every woman--except perhaps me--is in love with him.”
+
+“There's no danger of your loving any one besides yourself.”
+
+“I saw him the day before I left; told him where I was going. Then I had
+to beg him not to take the same train. He said he was going to Naples,
+anyhow, to sail from there for Spain. He will be at the Grand Hotel and
+I gave him permission to see me here once.”
+
+Lavinia revolved slowly.
+
+“Why not? He turned my head round at least twice.” She moved toward
+the door. “Ring whenever you like,” she said; “there are servants for
+everything.”
+
+In her room she wondered, with burning cheeks, when Abrego y Mochales
+would come. Her sentimental interest in him had waned a trifle during
+the past busy weeks; but, in spite of that, he was the great romantic
+attachment of her life. If he had returned her love no whispered scheme
+would have been too mad. What would he think of her now? But she knew
+instinctively that there would be no change in Mochales' attitude. He
+was in love with Gheta; blind to the rest of the world.
+
+She sat lost in a day-dream--how different her life would have been,
+married to the bull-fighter! She would have become a part of the fierce
+Spanish crowds at the ring, traveled to South America, seen the people
+heap roses, jewels, upon her idol....
+
+Cesare Orsi stood in the doorway, smiling with oppressive good-nature.
+
+“Lavinia,” he told her, “I've done something, and now I'm in the devil
+of a doubt.” He advanced, holding a small package, and sat on the edge
+of a chair, mopping his brow. “You see,” he began diffidently, “that is,
+as you must know, at first--you were at the convent--I thought something
+of proposing for your sister. Thank God,” he added vigorously, “I
+waited! Well, I didn't; although, to be completely honest, I knew that
+it came to be expected. I could see the surprise in your father's
+face. It occurred to me afterward that if I had brought Gheta any
+embarrassment I'd like to do something in a small way, a sort of
+acknowledgment. And to-day I saw this,” he held out the package; “it
+was pretty and I bought it for her at once. But now, when the moment
+arrives, I hesitate to give it to her. Gheta has grown so--so formal
+that I'm afraid of her,” he laughed.
+
+Lavinia unwrapped the paper covering from a green morocco box and,
+releasing the catch, saw a shimmering string of delicately pink pearls.
+
+“Cesare!” she exclaimed. “How gorgeous!” She lifted the necklace,
+letting it slide cool and fine through her fingers. “It's too good of
+you. This has cost hundreds and hundreds. I'll keep it myself.”
+
+He laughed, shaking all over; then fell serious.
+
+“Everything I have--all, all--is yours,” he assured her. Lavinia
+turned away with an uncomfortable feeling of falseness. “What do you
+predict--will Gheta take it, understand, or will she play the frozen
+princess?”
+
+“If I know Gheta, she'll take it,” Lavinia promptly replied.
+
+Orsi presented Gheta Sanviano with the necklace at dinner. She took it
+slowly from its box and glanced at the diamond clasp.
+
+“Thank you, Cesare, immensely! What a shame that pink pearls so closely
+resemble coral! No one gives you credit for them.”
+
+A feeling of shame for her sister's ungraciousness possessed Lavinia and
+mounted to angry resentment. She had no particular desire to champion
+Cesare, but the simplicity and kindness of his thought demanded more
+than a superficial admission. At the same time she had no intention of
+permitting Gheta any display of superiority here.
+
+“You need only say they were from Cesare,” she observed coldly; “with
+him, it is always pearls.”
+
+Such a tide of pleasure swept over her husband's countenance that
+Lavinia bit her lip in annoyance. She had intended only to rebuke Gheta
+and had not calculated the effect of her speech upon Cesare. She was
+scrupulously careful not to mislead the latter with regard to her
+feeling for him. She went to a rather needless extreme to demonstrate
+that she conducted herself from a sense of duty and propriety alone.
+
+Her married life, she assured herself, already resembled the
+Mantegazzas', whose indifferent courtesy she had marked and wondered at.
+Perhaps in time, like them, she would grow accustomed to it; but now it
+took all her determination to maintain the smallest daily amenities. It
+was not that her actual condition was unbearable, but only that it was
+so tragically removed from what she had imagined; she had dreamed of
+romance, it had been embodied for her eager gaze--and she had married
+Cesare Orsi!
+
+Gheta returned the necklace to its box and the dinner progressed in
+silence. The coffee was on when the elder sister said:
+
+“I had a card from the Grand Hotel a while ago; Abrego y Mochales is
+there.”
+
+“And there,” Orsi put in promptly, “I hope he'll stay, or sail for
+Spain. I don't want the clown about here.”
+
+Gheta turned.
+
+“But you will regret that,” she addressed Lavinia; “you always found him
+so fascinating.”
+
+Lavinia's husband cleared his throat sharply; he was clearly impatiently
+annoyed.
+
+“What foolishness!” he cried. “From the first, Lavinia has been scarcely
+conscious of his existence.”
+
+Lavinia avoided her sister's mocking gaze, disturbed and angry.
+
+“Certainly Signore Mochales must be asked here,” she declared.
+
+“I suppose it can't be avoided,” Orsi muttered.
+
+It was arranged that the Spaniard should dine with them on the following
+evening and Lavinia spent the intervening time in exploring her
+emotions. She recognized now that Gheta hated both Cesare and herself,
+and that she would miss no opportunity to force an awkward or even
+dangerously unpleasant situation upon them. Gheta had sharpened in
+being as well as in countenance to such a degree that Lavinia lost what
+natural affection for her sister she had retained.
+
+This, in a way, allied her with Cesare. She was now able at least to
+survey him in a detached manner, with an impersonal comprehension of his
+good qualities and aesthetic shortcomings; and in pointing out to Gheta
+the lavish beauty of her--Lavinia's--surroundings, she engendered in
+herself a slight proprietary pride. She met Abrego y Mochales at the
+basin with a direct bright smile, standing firmly upon her wall.
+
+Against the blue water shadowed by the promise of dusk he was a somber
+and splendid figure. Her heart undeniably beat faster and she was vexed
+when he turned immediately to Gheta. His greeting was intensely serious,
+his gaze so hungry that Lavinia looked away. It was vulgar, she told
+herself. Cesare met them above and greeted Mochales with a superficial
+heartiness. It was difficult for Cesare Orsi to conceal his opinions and
+feelings. The other man's gravity was superb.
+
+At dinner conversation languished. Gheta, in a very low dress, had
+a bright red scarf about her shoulders, and was painted. This was so
+unusual that it had almost the effect of a disguise; her eyes were
+staring and brilliant, her fingers constantly fidgeting and creasing
+her napkin. Afterward she walked with Mochales to the corner of the
+belvedere, where they had all been sitting, and from there drifted
+the low continuous murmur of her voice, briefly punctuated by a deep
+masculine note of interrogation. Below, the water was invisible in the
+wrap of night. Naples shone like a pale gold net drawn about the sweep
+of its hills. A glow like a thumb print hung over Vesuvius; the hidden
+column of smoke smudged the stars.
+
+Lavinia grew restless and descended to her room, where she procured a
+fan. Returning, she was partly startled by a pale still figure in the
+gloom of a passage. She saw that it was Gheta, and spoke; but the other
+moved away without reply and quickly vanished. Above, Lavinia halted
+at the strange spectacle--clearly drawn against the luminous depths of
+space--of Mochales and her husband rigidly facing each other.
+
+“I must admit,” Orsi said in an exasperated voice, “that I don't
+understand.”
+
+Lavinia saw that he was holding something in a half-extended hand.
+Moving closer, she identified the object as the necklace he had given
+Gheta.
+
+“What is it that you don't understand, Cesare?” she asked.
+
+“Some infernal joke or foolishness!”
+
+“It is no joke, signore,” Mochales responded; “and it is
+better,--perhaps, for your wife to leave us.”
+
+Orsi turned to Lavinia.
+
+“He gives me back this necklace of Gheta's,” he explained; “he says that
+he has every right. It appears that Gheta is going to marry him, and he
+already objects to presents from her brother-in-law.”
+
+“But what stuff!” Lavinia pronounced.
+
+A swift surprise overtook her at Cesare's announcement--Gheta and
+Mochales to marry! She was certain that the arrangement had not existed
+that morning. A fleet inchoate sorrow numbed her heart and fled.
+
+“Orsi has been only truthful enough to suit his own purpose,” Mochales
+stated, “Signora, please----” He indicated the descent from the
+belvedere.
+
+She moved closer to him, smiling appealingly.
+
+“What is it all about?” she queried.
+
+“Forgive me; it is impossible to answer.”
+
+“Cesare?” She addressed her husband.
+
+“Why, this--this donkey hints that there was something improper in my
+present. It seems that I have been annoying Gheta by my attentions,
+flattering her with pearls.”
+
+“Did Gheta tell you that?” Lavinia demanded. A growing resentment took
+possession of her. “Because if she did, she lied!”
+
+“Ah!” Mochales whispered sharply.
+
+“They're both mad,” Orsi told her, “and should be dipped in the bay.”
+
+Never had Abrego y Mochales appeared handsomer; never more like fine
+bronze. That latter fact struck her forcibly. His face was no more
+mutable than a mask of metal. Its stark rigidity sent a cold tremor to
+her heart.
+
+“And,” she went on impetuously, “since Gheta said that, I'll tell you
+really about this necklace: Cesare gave it to her because he was sorry
+for her; because he thought that perhaps he had misled her. He spoke of
+it to me first.”
+
+“No, signora,” the Spaniard responded deliberately; “it is not your
+sister who lies.”
+
+Cesare Orsi exclaimed angrily. He took a hasty step; but Lavinia,
+quicker, moved between the two men.
+
+“This is impossible,” she declared, “and must stop immediately! It is
+childish!”
+
+There was now a metallic ring in Mochales' voice that disturbed her even
+more than his words. The bull-fighter, completely immobile, seemed
+a little inhuman; he was without a visible stir of emotion, but Orsi
+looked more puzzled and angry every moment.
+
+“This,” he ejaculated, “in my own house--infamous!”
+
+“Signor Mochales,” Lavinia reiterated, “what I have told you is
+absolutely so.”
+
+“Your sister, signora, has said something different.... She did not want
+to tell me, but I persisted--I saw that something was wrong--and forced
+it from her.”
+
+“Enough!” Orsi commanded. “One can see plainly that you have been duped;
+some things may be overlooked.... You have talked enough.”
+
+Mochales moved easily forward.
+
+“You pudding!” he said in a low even voice. “Do you talk to me--Abrego y
+Mochales?”
+
+A dark tide of passion, visible even in the night, flooded Orsi's
+countenance.
+
+“Leave!” he insisted, “Or I'll have you flung into the bay.”
+
+A deep silence followed, in which Lavinia could hear the stir of the
+water against the walls below. A sharp fear entered her heart, a new
+dread of the Spaniard. He was completely outside the circle of impulses
+which she understood and to which she reacted. He was not a part of her
+world; he coldly menaced the foundations of all right and security.
+Her worship of romance died miserably. In a way, she thought, she was
+responsible for the present horrible situation; it was the result of the
+feeling she had had for Mochales. Lavinia was certain that if Gheta
+had not known of it the Spaniard would have been quickly dropped by the
+elder. She was suddenly conscious of the perfume he always bore; that,
+curiously, lent him a strange additional oppression.
+
+“Mochales,” he said in a species of strained wonderment, “threatened ...
+thrown into the bay! Mochales--the Flower of Spain! And by a helpless
+mound of fat, a tub of entrails----”
+
+“Cesare!” Lavinia cried in an energy of desperation. “Come! Don't listen
+to him.”
+
+Orsi released her grasp.
+
+“I believe you are at the Grand Hotel?” he addressed the other man.
+
+“Until I hear from you.”
+
+“To-morrow----”
+
+All the heat had apparently evaporated from their words; they spoke with
+a perfunctory politeness. Cesare Orsi said:
+
+“I will order the launch.”
+
+In a few minutes the palpitations of the steam died in the direction of
+Naples.
+
+VII
+
+Lavinia followed her husband to their rooms, where he sat smoking one
+of his long black cigars. He was pale; his brow was wet and his collar
+wilted. She stood beside him and he patted her arm.
+
+“Everything is in order,” he assured her.
+
+A species of blundering tenderness for him possessed her; an unexpected
+throb of her being startled and robbed her of words. He mistook her
+continued silence.
+
+“All I have is yours,” he explained; “it is your right. I can see now
+that--that my money was all I had to offer you. The only thing of value
+I possess. I should have realized that a girl, charming like yourself,
+couldn't care for a mound of fat.” Her tenderness rose till it choked in
+her throat, blurred what she had to say.
+
+“Cesare,” she told him, “Gheta was right; at one time I was in love with
+Mochales.” He turned with a startled exclamation; but she silenced him.
+“He was, it seemed, all that a girl might admire--dark and mysterious
+and handsome. He was romantic. I demanded nothing else then; now
+something has happened that I don't altogether understand, but it has
+changed everything for me. Cesare, your money never made any difference
+in my feeling for you--it didn't before and it doesn't to-night--” She
+hesitated and blushed painfully, awkwardly.
+
+The cigar fell from his hand and he rose, eagerly facing her.
+
+“Lavinia,” he asked, “is it possible--do you mean that you care the
+least about me?”
+
+“It must be that, Cesare, because I am so terribly afraid.”
+
+Later he admitted ruefully:
+
+“But no man should resemble, as I do, a great oyster. I shall pay very
+dearly for my laziness.”
+
+“You are not going to fight Mochales!” she protested. “It would be
+insanity.”
+
+“Insanity,” he agreed promptly. “Yet I can't permit myself to be the
+target for vile tongues.”
+
+Lavinia abruptly left him and hurried to her sister's room. The door was
+locked; she knocked, but got no response.
+
+“Gheta,” she called, low and urgently, “open at once! Your plans have
+gone dreadfully wrong. Gheta!” she said more sharply into the answering
+silence. “Cesare has had a terrific argument with Mochales, and worse
+may follow. Open!” There was still no answer, and suddenly she beat
+upon the door with her fists. “Liar!” she cried thinly through the wood.
+“Liar! You bitter old stick! I'll make you eat that necklace, pearl for
+pearl, sorrow for sorrow!”
+
+A feeling of impotence overwhelmed her at the implacable stillness that
+succeeded her hysterical outburst. She stood with a pounding heart, and
+clasped straining fingers.
+
+Abrego y Mochales could kill Cesare without the slightest shadow of a
+question. There was, she recognized, something essentially feminine in
+the saturnine bullfighter; his pride had been severely assaulted; and
+therefore he would be--in his own, less subtle manner--as dangerous
+as Gheta. Cesare's self-esteem, too, had been wounded in its most
+vulnerable place--he had been insulted before her. But, even if the
+latter refused to proceed, Mochales, she knew, would force an acute
+conclusion. There was nothing to be got from her sister and she
+slowly returned to her chamber, from which she could hear Orsi's heavy
+footfalls.
+
+She mechanically removed the square emerald that hung from a platinum
+thread about her neck, took off her rings, and proceeded to the small
+iron safe where valuables were kept. As she swung open the door a sheet
+of paper slipped forward from an upper compartment. It bore a
+printed address ... in the Strada San Lucia. She saw that it was the
+blackmailing letter Cesare had received from the Neapolitan secret
+society, demanding two thousand lire. She recalled what he had said at
+the time--if she had an enemy her gown could be spoiled in the foyer of
+the opera; a man ruined at his club.... Even murders were ascribed to
+it.
+
+She held the letter, gazing fixedly at the address, mentally repeating
+again and again the significance of its contents. She thought of
+showing it to Cesare, suggesting----But she realized that, bound by a
+conventional honor, he would absolutely refuse to listen to her.
+
+Almost subconsciously she folded the sheet and hid it in her dress.
+Kneeling before the safe she procured a long red envelope. It contained
+the sum of money her father had given her at the wedding. It was her
+dot--a comparatively small amount, he had said at the time with an
+apologetic smile; but it was absolutely, unquestionably her own. This,
+when she locked the safe, remained outside.
+
+When she had hidden the letter and envelope in her dressing table Cesare
+stood in the doorway. He was still pale, but composed, and held himself
+with simple dignity.
+
+“Some men,” he said, “are not so happy, even for an hour.”
+
+A sudden passionate necessity to save him swept over her.
+
+In the morning Orsi remained at the villa, but he sent the launch in
+early with an urgent summons for the Cavaliere Nelli. Later, when he
+asked for Lavinia, he was told that she had gone to Naples; and when
+the boat returned, Nelli--a military figure, with hair and mustache like
+yellowish white silk--assisted her to the wall. She was closely veiled
+against the sparkling flood of light and bay, and hurried directly to
+her room.
+
+There she knelt on a praying chair before a small alcoved altar with
+tall wax tapers, and remained a long while. She was disturbed by a
+sudden ringing report below; it was Cesare practising with a dueling
+pistol. Lavinia remembered, from laughing comments in Florence, that
+her husband was an atrocious shot. The sound was repeated at irregular
+intervals through an unbearably long morning.
+
+Gheta, she learned, had refused the morning chocolate and, with her
+maid, had collected and packed all her effects. Lavinia had no desire to
+see her. The situation now was past Gheta's mending.
+
+After luncheon Lavinia remained in her room, Nelli departed for Naples
+and Cesare joined her. It was evident that he was greatly disturbed;
+but he spoke to her evenly. He was possessed by an impotent rage at
+his unwieldy body and clumsy hand. This alternated with an evident
+wonderment at the position in which he found himself and a great
+tenderness for Lavinia.
+
+At dusk they were in Lavinia's room waiting for a message from Naples.
+Lavinia was leaning across the marble ledge of her window, gazing over
+the dim blue sweep of water to the distant flowering lights. She heard
+sudden footsteps and, half turning, saw her husband tearing open an
+envelope.
+
+“Lavinia!” he cried. “There has been an accident in the elevator of the
+Grand Hotel, and Mochales--is dead!” She hung upon the ledge now for
+support. “The attendant, a new man, started the car too soon and caught
+Mochales----” She sank down upon her knees in an attitude of prayer, and
+Cesare Orsi stood reverently bowed.
+
+“The will of God!” he muttered.
+
+A long slow shiver passed over Lavinia, and he bent and lifted her in
+his arms.
+
+
+
+
+TOL'ABLE DAVID
+
+I
+
+He was the younger of two brothers, in his sixteenth year; and he
+had his father's eyes--a tender and idyllic blue. There, however, the
+obvious resemblance ended. The elder's azure gaze was set in a face
+scarred and riven by hardship, debauch and disease; he had been--before
+he had inevitably returned to the mountains where he was born--a
+brakeman in the lowest stratum of the corruption of small cities on
+big railroads; and his thin stooped body, his gaunt head and uncertain
+hands, all bore the stamp of ruinous years. But in the midst of this
+his eyes, like David's, retained their singularly tranquil color of
+sweetness and innocence.
+
+David was the youngest, the freshest thing imaginable; he was overtall
+and gawky, his cheeks were as delicately rosy as apple blossoms, and his
+smile was an epitome of ingenuous interest and frank wonder. It was
+as if some quality of especial fineness, lingering unspotted in Hunter
+Kinemon, had found complete expression in his son David. A great deal of
+this certainly was due to his mother, a thick solid woman, who retained
+more than a trace of girlish beauty when she stood back, flushed from
+the heat of cooking, or, her bright eyes snapping, tramped with heavy
+pails from the milking shed on a winter morning.
+
+Both the Kinemon boys were engaging. Allen, almost twenty-one, was,
+of course, the more conspicuous; he was called the strongest youth in
+Greenstream County. He had his mother's brown eyes; a deep bony box of
+a chest; rippling shoulders; and a broad peaceful countenance. He drove
+the Crabapple stage, between Crabapple, the village just over the back
+mountain, and Beaulings, in West Virginia. It was twenty-six miles from
+point to point, a way that crossed a towering range, hung above a far
+veil of unbroken spruce, forded swift glittering streams, and followed
+a road that passed rare isolated dwellings, dominating rocky and
+precarious patches and hills of cultivation. One night Allen slept in
+Beaulings; the next he was home, rising at four o'clock in order to take
+his stage out of Crabapple at seven sharp.
+
+It was a splendid job, and brought them thirty-five dollars a month; not
+in mere trade at the store, but actual money. This, together with Hunter
+Kinemon's position, tending the rich bottom farm of State Senator Gait,
+gave them a position of ease and comfort in Greenstream. They were a
+very highly esteemed family.
+
+Gait's farm was in grazing; it extended in deep green pastures and
+sparkling water between two high mountainous walls drawn across east and
+west. In the morning the rising sun cast long delicate shadows on one
+side; at evening the shadow troops lengthened across the emerald valley
+from the other. The farmhouse occupied a fenced clearing on the eastern
+rise, with a gray huddle of barn and sheds below, a garden patch of
+innumerable bean poles, and an incessant stir of snowy chickens. Beyond,
+the cattle moved in sleek chestnut-brown and orange herds; and farther
+out flocks of sheep shifted like gray-white clouds on a green-blue sky.
+
+It was, Mrs. Kinemon occasionally complained, powerful lonely, with the
+store two miles up the road, Crabapple over a heft of a rise, and no
+personable neighbors; and she kept a loaded rifle in an angle of the
+kitchen when the men were all out in a distant pasturage. But David
+liked it extremely well; he liked riding an old horse after the steers,
+the all-night sap boilings in spring groves, the rough path across a rib
+of the mountain to school.
+
+Nevertheless, he was glad when studying was over for the year. It
+finished early in May, on account of upland planting, and left
+David with a great many weeks filled only with work that seem to him
+unadulterated play. Even that didn't last all the time; there were hours
+when he could fish for trout, plentiful in cool rocky pools; or shoot
+gray squirrels in the towering maples. Then, of evenings, he could
+listen to Allen's thrilling tales of the road, of the gambling and
+fighting among the lumbermen in Beaulings, or of strange people that had
+taken passage in the Crabapple stage--drummers, for the most part, with
+impressive diamond rings and the doggonedest lies imaginable. But they
+couldn't fool Allen, however believing he might seem.... The Kinemons
+were listening to such a recital by their eldest son now.
+
+They were gathered in a room of very general purpose. It had a rough
+board floor and crumbling plaster walls, and held a large scarred cherry
+bed with high posts and a gayly quilted cover; a long couch, covered
+with yellow untanned sheepskins; a primitive telephone; some painted
+wooden chairs; a wardrobe, lurching insecurely forward; and an empty
+iron stove with a pipe let into an original open hearth with a wide
+rugged stone. Beyond, a door opened into the kitchen, and back of the
+bed a raw unguarded flight of steps led up to the peaked space where
+Allen and David slept.
+
+Hunter Kinemon was extended on the couch, his home-knitted socks
+comfortably free of shoes, smoking a sandstone pipe with a reed stem.
+Mrs. Kinemon was seated in a rocking-chair with a stained and torn red
+plush cushion, that moved with a thin complaint on a fixed base. Allen
+was over against the stove, his corduroy trousers thrust into greased
+laced boots, and a black cotton shirt open on a chest and throat like
+pink marble. And David supported his lanky length, in a careless and
+dust-colored garb, with a capacious hand on the oak beam of the mantel.
+
+It was May, school had stopped, and a door was open on a warm still
+dusk. Allen's tale had come to an end; he was pinching the ear of a
+diminutive dog--like a fat white sausage with wire-thin legs and a rat
+tail--that never left him. The smoke from the elder Kinemon's pipe rose
+in a tranquil cloud. Mrs. Kinemon rocked vigorously, with a prolonged
+wail of the chair springs. “I got to put some tallow to that chair,”
+ Kinemon proclaimed.
+
+“The house on Elbow Barren's took,” Allen told him suddenly--“the one
+just off the road. I saw smoke in the chimney this evening.”
+
+A revival of interest, a speculation, followed this announcement.
+
+“Any women'll get to the church,” Mr. Kinemon asserted. “I wonder? Did a
+person say who were they?”
+
+“I asked; but they're strange to Crabapple. I heard this though: there
+weren't any women to them--just men--father and sons like. I drew up
+right slow going by; but nobody passed out a word. It's a middling bad
+farm place--rocks and berry bushes. I wouldn't reckon much would be
+content there.”
+
+David walked out through the open doorway and stood on the small
+covered portico, that with a bench on each side, hung to the face of
+the dwelling. The stars were brightening in the sky above the confining
+mountain walls; there was a tremendous shrilling of frogs; the faint
+clamor of a sheep bell. He was absolutely, irresponsibly happy. He
+wished the time would hurry when he'd be big and strong like Allen, and
+get out into the absorbing stir of the world.
+
+II
+
+He was dimly roused by Allen's departure in the beginning brightness of
+the following morning. The road over which the stage ran drew by the
+rim of the farm; and later David saw the rigid three-seated surrey, the
+leather mail bags strapped in the rear, trotted by under the swinging
+whip of his brother. He heard the faint sharp bark of Rocket, Allen's
+dog, braced at his side.
+
+David spent the day with his father, repairing the fencing of the middle
+field, swinging a mall and digging post holes; and at evening his arms
+ached. But he assured himself he was not tired; any brother of Allen's
+couldn't give in before such insignificant effort. When Hunter Kinemon
+turned back toward house and supper David made a wide circle, ostensibly
+to see whether there was rock salt enough out for the cattle, but
+in reality to express his superabundant youth, staying qualities and
+unquenchable vivid interest in every foot of the valley.
+
+He saw the meanest kind of old fox, and marked what he thought might be
+its hole; his flashing gaze caught the obscure distant retreat of ground
+hogs; he threw a contemptuous clod at the woolly-brained sheep; and with
+a bent willow shoot neatly looped a trout out upon the grassy bank. As
+a consequence of all this he was late for supper, and sat at the table
+with his mother, who never took her place until the men--yes, and boys
+of her family--had satisfied their appetites. The dark came on and she
+lighted a lamp swinging under a tin reflector from the ceiling. The
+kitchen was an addition, and had a sloping shed roof, board sides, a
+polished stove, and a long table with a red cloth.
+
+His father, David learned, attacking a plateful of brown chicken
+swimming with greens and gravy, was having another bad spell. He had the
+familiar sharp pain through his back and his arms hurt him.
+
+“He can't be drove to a doctor,” the woman told David, speaking, in her
+concern, as if to an equal in age and comprehension.
+
+David had grown accustomed to the elder's periods of suffering; they
+came, twisted his father's face into deep lines, departed, and things
+were exactly as before--or very nearly the same. The boy saw that Hunter
+Kinemon couldn't support labor that only two or three years before he
+would have finished without conscious effort. David resolutely ignored
+this; he felt that it must be a cause of shame, unhappiness, to his
+father; and he never mentioned it to Allen. Kinemon lay very still on
+the couch; his pipe, beside him on the floor, had spilled its live core,
+burning into a length of rag carpet. His face, hung with shadows like
+the marks of a sooty finger, was glistening with fine sweat. Not a
+whisper of complaint passed his dry lips. When his wife approached
+he attempted to smooth out his corrugated countenance. His eyes, as
+tenderly blue as flowers, gazed at her with a faint masking of humor.
+
+“This is worse'n usual,” she said sharply. “And I ain't going to have
+you fill yourself with any more of that patent trash. You don't spare
+me by not letting on. I can tell as soon as you're miserable. David can
+fetch the doctor from Crabapple to-night if you don't look better.”
+
+“But I am,” he assured her. “It's just a comeback of an old ache. There
+was a power of heavy work to that fence.”
+
+“You'll have to get more to help you,” she continued. “That Galt'll let
+you kill yourself and not turn a hand. He can afford a dozen. I don't
+mind housing and cooking for them. David's only tol'able for lifting,
+too, while he's growing.”
+
+“Why,” David protested, “it ain't just nothing what I do. I could do
+twice as much. I don't believe Allen could helt more'n me when he was
+sixteen. It ain't just nothing at all.”
+
+He was disturbed by this assault upon his manhood; if his muscles were
+still a little stringy it was surprising what he could accomplish with
+them. He would show her to-morrow.
+
+“And,” he added impetuously, “I can shoot better than Allen right
+now. You ask him if I can't. You ask him what I did with that cranky
+twenty-two last Sunday up on the mountain.”
+
+His clear gaze sought her, his lean face quivered with anxiety to
+impress, convince her of his virility, skill. His jaw was as sharp as
+the blade of a hatchet. She studied him with a new surprised concern.
+
+“David!” she exclaimed. “For a minute you had the look of a man. A real
+steady look, like your father. Don't you grow up too fast, David,”
+ she directed him, in an irrepressible maternal solicitude. “I want a
+boy--something young--round a while yet.”
+
+Hunter Kinemon sat erect and reached for his pipe. The visible strain
+of his countenance had been largely relaxed. When his wife had left the
+room for a moment he admitted to David:
+
+“That was a hard one. I thought she had me that time.”
+
+The elder's voice was light, steady. The boy gazed at him with intense
+admiration. He felt instinctively that nothing mortal could shake the
+other's courage. And, on top of his mother's complimentary surprise, his
+father had confided in him, made an admission that, David realized, must
+be kept from fretting women. He couldn't have revealed more to Allen
+himself.
+
+He pictured the latter swinging magnificently into Beaulings, cracking
+the whip over the horses' ears, putting on the grinding brake before the
+post-office. No one, even in that town of reckless drinking, ever
+tried to down Allen; he was as ready as he was strong. He had charge of
+Government mail and of passengers; he carried a burnished revolver in
+a holster under the seat at his hand. Allen would kill anybody who
+interfered with him. So would he--David--if a man edged up on him or on
+his family; if any one hurt even a dog of his, his own dog, he'd shoot
+him.
+
+An inextinguishable hot pride, a deep sullen intolerance, rose in him at
+the thought of an assault on his personal liberty, his rights, or on
+his connections and belongings. A deeper red burned in his fresh young
+cheeks; his smiling lips were steady; his candid blue eyes, ineffably
+gentle, gazed widely against the candlelit gloom where he was making his
+simple preparations for bed. The last feeling of which he was conscious
+was a wave of sharp admiration, of love, for everything and everybody
+that constituted his home.
+
+III
+
+Allen, on his return the following evening, immediately opened an
+excited account of the new family, with no women, on the place by Elbow
+Barren.
+
+“I heard they were from down hellwards on the Clinch,” he repeated; “and
+then that they'd come from Kentucky. Anyway, they're bad. Ed Arbogast
+just stepped on their place for a pleasant howdy, and some one on the
+stoop hollered for him to move. Ed, he saw the shine on a rifle barrel,
+and went right along up to the store. Then they hired Simmons--the one
+that ain't good in his head--to cut out bush; and Simmons trailed home
+after a while with the side of his face all tore, where he'd been hit
+with a piece of board. Simmons' brother went and asked them what was it
+about; and one of the Hatburns--that's their name--said he'd busted the
+loony just because!”
+
+“What did Simmons answer back?” Hunter Kinemon demanded, his coffee cup
+suspended.
+
+“Nothing much; he'd law them, or something like that. The Simmonses
+are right spindling; they don't belong in Greenstream either.” David
+commented: “I wouldn't have et a thing till I'd got them!” In the ruddy
+reflection of the lamp his pink-and-blue charm, his shy lips, resembled
+a pastoral divinity of boyhood. Allen laughed.
+
+“That family, the Hatburns----” He paused. “Why, they'd just mow you
+down with the field daisies.”
+
+David flushed with annoyance. He saw his mother studying him with the
+attentive concern she had first shown the day before yesterday.
+
+“You have no call to mix in with them,” Kinemon told his elder son.
+“Drive stage and mind your business. I'd even step aside a little from
+folks like that.”
+
+A sense of surprised disappointment invaded David at his father's
+statement. It seemed to him out of keeping with the elder's courage and
+determination. It, too, appeared almost spindling. Perhaps he had said
+it because his wife, a mere woman, was there. He was certain that Allen
+would not agree with such mildness. The latter, lounging back from the
+table, narrowed his eyes; his fingers played with the ears of his dog,
+Rocket. Allen gave his father a cigar and lit one himself, a present
+from a passenger on the stage. David could see a third in Allen's shirt
+pocket, and he longed passionately for the day when he would be old
+enough to have a cigar offered him. He longed for the time when he, like
+Allen, would be swinging a whip over the horses of a stage, rambling
+down a steep mountain, or walking up at the team's head to take off some
+weight.
+
+Where the stage line stopped in Beaulings the railroad began. Allen, he
+knew, intended in the fall to give up the stage for the infinitely
+wider world of freight cars; and David wondered whether Priest, the
+storekeeper in Crabapple who had charge of the awarding of the position,
+could be brought to see that he was as able a driver, almost, as Allen.
+
+It was probable Priest would call him too young for the charge of the
+Government mail. But he wasn't; Allen had to admit that he, David, was
+the straighter shot. He wouldn't step aside for any Hatburn alive. And,
+he decided, he would smoke nothing but cigars. He considered whether he
+might light his small clay pipe, concealed under the stoop, before the
+family; but reluctantly concluded that that day had not yet arrived.
+
+Allen passed driving the next morning as usual, leaving a gray wreath
+of dust to settle back into the tranquil yellow sunshine; the sun moved
+from the east barrier to the west; a cool purple dusk filled the valley,
+and the shrilling of the frogs rose to meet the night. The following day
+was almost identical--the shadows swept out, shortened under the groves
+of trees and drew out again over the sheep on the western slope. Before
+Allen reached home he had to feed and bed his horses, and walk back the
+two miles over the mountain from Crabapple; and a full hour before the
+time for his brother's arrival, David was surprised to see the stage
+itself making its way over the precarious turf road that led up to the
+Kinemons' dwelling. He was standing by the portico, and immediately
+his mother moved out to his side, as if subconsciously disturbed by
+the unusual occurrence. David saw, while the stage was still diminutive
+against the rolling pasture, that Allen was not driving; and there was
+an odd confusion of figures in a rear seat. Mrs. Kinemon said at once,
+in a shrill strange voice:
+
+“Something has happened to Allen!” She pressed her hands against her
+laboring breast; David ran forward and met the surrey as it came through
+the fence opening by the stable shed. Ed Arbogast was driving; and a
+stranger--a drummer evidently--in a white-and-black check suit, was
+holding Allen, crumpled in a dreadful bloody faint.
+
+“Where's Hunter?” Arbogast asked the boy.
+
+“There he comes now,” David replied, his heart pounding wildly and dread
+constricting his throat.
+
+Hunter Kinemon and his wife reached the stage at the same moment. Both
+were plaster-white; but the woman was shaking with frightened concern,
+while her husband was deliberate and still.
+
+“Help me carry him in to our bed,” he addressed Ed Arbogast.
+
+They lifted Allen out and bore him toward the house, his limp fingers,
+David saw, trailing through the grass. At first the latter involuntarily
+turned away; but, objurgating such cowardice, he forced himself to gaze
+at Allen. He recognized at once that his brother had not been shot; his
+hip was too smeared and muddy for that. It was, he decided, an accident,
+as Arbogast and the drummer lead Hunter Kinemon aside. David Kinemon
+walked resolutely up to the little group. His father gestured for him
+to go away, but he ignored the elder's command. He must know what
+had happened to Allen. The stranger in the checked suit was speaking
+excitedly, waving trembling hands--a sharp contrast to the grim
+immobility of the Greenstream men:
+
+“He'd been talking about that family, driving out of Beaulings and
+saying how they had done this and that; and when we came to where
+they lived he pointed out the house. A couple of dark-favored men were
+working in a patch by the road, and he waved his whip at them, in a
+way of speaking; but they never made a sign. The horses were going slow
+then; and, for some reason or other, his little dog jumped to the road
+and ran in on the patch. Sirs, one of those men spit, stepped up to the
+dog, and kicked it into Kingdom Come.”
+
+David's hands clenched; and he drew in a sharp sobbing breath.
+
+“This Allen,” the other continued, “pulled in the team and drawed a
+gun from under the seat before I could move a hand. You can hear me--I
+wouldn't have kicked any dog of his for all the gold there is! He got
+down from the stage and started forward, and his face was black; then
+he stopped, undecided. He stood studying, with the two men watching
+him, one leaning careless on a grub hoe. Then, by heaven, he turned and
+rested the gun on the seat, and walked up to where laid the last of his
+dog. He picked it up, and says he:
+
+“'Hatburn, I got Government mail on that stage to get in under contract,
+and there's a passenger too--paid to Crabapple; but when I get them
+two things done I'm coming back to kill you two dead to hear the last
+trumpet.'
+
+“The one on the hoe laughed; but the other picked up a stone like my
+two fists and let Allen have it in the back. It surprised him like; he
+stumbled forward, and the other stepped out and laid the hoe over his
+head. It missed him mostly, but enough landed to knock Allen over. He
+rolled into the ditch, like, by the road; and then Hatburn jumped down
+on him, deliberate, with lumbermen's irons in his shoes.”
+
+David was conscious of an icy flood pouring through him; a revulsion of
+grief and fury that blinded him. Tears welled over his fresh cheeks
+in an audible crying. But he was silenced by the aspect of his father.
+Hunter Kinemon's tender blue eyes had changed apparently into bits of
+polished steel; his mouth was pinched until it was only a line among the
+other lines and seaming of his worn face.
+
+“I'd thank you to drive the stage into Crabapple, Ed,” he said; “and if
+you see the doctor coming over the mountain--he's been rung up for--ask
+him, please sir, will he hurry.” He turned and walked abruptly away,
+followed by David.
+
+Allen lay under the gay quilt in the Kinemons' big bed. His stained
+clothes drooped from a chair where Mrs. Kinemon had flung them. Allen's
+face was like white paper; suddenly it had grown as thin and sharp as
+an old man's. Only a slight quiver of his eyelids showed that he was not
+dead.
+
+Hunter Kinemon sat on the couch, obviously waiting for the doctor. He,
+too, looked queer, David thought. He wished his father would break
+the dreadful silence gathering over them; but the only sound was the
+stirring of the woman in the kitchen, boiling a pot of water. Allen
+moved and cried out in a knifelike agony, and a flicker of suffering
+passed over his father's face.
+
+An intolerable hour dragged out before the doctor arrived; and then
+David was driven from the room. He sat outside on the portico, listening
+to the passage of feet about Allen in a high shuddering protest. David's
+hands and feet were still cold, but he was conscious of an increasing
+stillness within, an attitude not unlike his father's. He held out an
+arm and saw that it was as steady as a beam of the stoop roof. He was
+without definite plan or knowledge of what must occur; but he told
+himself that any decision of Hunter Kinemon's must not exclude him.
+
+There were four Hatburns; but two Kinemons were better; and he meant his
+father and himself, for he knew instinctively that Allen was badly hurt.
+Soon there would be no Hatburns at all. And then the law could do as
+it pleased. It seemed to David a long way from the valley, from Allen
+broken in bed, to the next term of court--September--in Crabapple. The
+Kinemons could protect, revenge, their own.
+
+The doctor passed out, and David entered where his mother was bent above
+her elder son. Hunter Kinemon, with a blackened rag, was wiping the lock
+of an old but efficient repeating rifle. His motions were unhurried,
+careful. Mrs. Kinemon gazed at him with blanching lips, but she
+interposed no word. There was another rifle, David knew, in the long
+cupboard by the hearth; and he was moving to secure it when his father's
+voice halted him in the middle of the floor. “You David,” he said, “I
+want you to stop along here with your mother. It ain't fit for her to be
+left alone with Allen, and there's a mess of little things for doing.
+I want those cows milked dry, and catch in those little Dominicker
+chickens before that old gander eats them up.”
+
+David was about to protest, to sob out a passionate refusal, when a
+glimpse of his father's expression silenced him. He realized that the
+slightest argument would be worse than futile. There wasn't a particle
+of familiar feeling in the elder's voice; suddenly David was afraid of
+him. Hunter Kinemon slipped a number of heavily greased cartridges into
+the rifle's magazine. Then he rose and said:
+
+“Well, Mattie?”
+
+His wife laid her hand on his shoulder.
+
+“Hunter,” she told him, “you've been a mighty sweet and good husband.”
+ He drew his hand slowly and lovingly across her cheek.
+
+“I'm sorry about this, Mattie,” he replied; “I've been powerful happy
+along with you and all of us. David, be a likely boy.” He walked out of
+the room, across the grass to the stable shed.
+
+“He's going to drive to Elbow Barren,” David muttered; “and he hadn't
+ought to have left me to tend the cows and chickens. That's for a woman
+to do. I ought to be right along with him facing down those Hatburns. I
+can shoot, and my hand is steady as his.”
+
+He stood in the doorway, waiting for the reappearance of his father with
+the roan horse to hitch to their old buggy. It didn't occur to David to
+wonder at the fact that the other was going alone to confront four men.
+The Kinemons had a mort of friends who would have gladly accompanied,
+assisted Hunter; but this, the boy told himself, was their own
+affair--their own pride.
+
+From within came the sound of his mother, crying softly, and of Allen
+murmuring in his pain. David was appalled by the swift change that had
+fallen over them--the breaking up of his entire world, the shifting
+of every hope and plan. He was appalled and confused; the thoughtless
+unquestioning security of his boyhood had been utterly destroyed.
+He looked about dazed at the surrounding scene, callous in its total
+carelessness of Allen's injury, his haggard father with the rifle. The
+valley was serenely beautiful; doves were calling from the eaves of the
+barn; a hen clucked excitedly. The western sky was a single expanse of
+primrose on which the mountains were jagged and blue.
+
+He had never known the elder to be so long getting the bridle on the
+roan; the buggy was drawn up outside. An uneasy tension increased within
+him--a pressing necessity to see his father leading out their horse. He
+didn't come, and finally David was forced to walk over to the shed.
+
+The roan had been untied, and turned as the boy entered; but David,
+at first, failed to find Hunter Kinemon; then he almost stepped on his
+hand. His father lay across a corner of the earthen floor, with the
+bridle tangled in stiff fingers, and his blue eyes staring blankly up.
+
+David stifled an exclamation of dread, and forced himself to bend
+forward and touch the gray face. Only then he realized that he was
+looking at death. The pain in his father's back had got him at last! The
+rifle had been carefully placed against the wall; and, without realizing
+the significance of his act, David picked it up and laid the cold barrel
+against his rigid young body.
+
+IV
+
+On the evening after Hunter Kinemon's burial in the rocky steep
+graveyard above Crabapple, David and his mother sat, one on the couch,
+the other in her creaking rocking-chair, lost in heavy silence. Allen
+moved in a perpetual uneasy pain on the bed, his face drawn and fretful,
+and shadowed by a soft young beard. The wardrobe doors stood open,
+revealing a stripped interior; wooden chairs were tied back to back; and
+two trunks--one of mottled paper, the other of ancient leather--stood
+by the side of a willow basket filled with a miscellany of housekeeping
+objects.
+
+What were left of the Kinemons were moving into a small house on the
+edge of Crabapple; Senator Galt had already secured another tenant for
+the care of his bottom acres and fat herds. The night swept into the
+room, fragrant and blue, powdered with stars; the sheep bells sounded in
+a faintly distant clashing; a whippoorwill beat its throat out against
+the piny dark.
+
+An overpowering melancholy surged through David; though his youth
+responded to the dramatic, the tragic change that had enveloped them,
+at the same time he was reluctant to leave the farm, the valley with its
+trout and ground hogs, its fox holes and sap boilings. These feelings
+mingled in the back of his consciousness; his active thoughts were all
+directed toward the time when, with the rifle, the obligation that he
+had picked up practically from his dead father's hand, he would walk up
+to the Hatburn place and take full payment for Allen's injury and their
+paternal loss.
+
+He felt uneasily that he should have gone before this--at once; but
+there had been a multitude of small duties connected with the funeral,
+intimate things that could not be turned over to the kindest neighbors;
+and the ceremony itself, it seemed to him, should be attended by dignity
+and repose.
+
+Now, however, it was over; and only his great duty remained, filling the
+entire threshold of his existence. He had no plan; only a necessity to
+perform. It was possible that he would fail--there were four Hatburns;
+and that chance depressed him. If he were killed there was no one else,
+for Allen could never take another step. That had been disclosed by the
+most casual examination of his injury. Only himself, David, remained to
+uphold the pride of the Kinemons.
+
+He gazed covertly at his mother; she must not, certainly, be warned of
+his course; she was a woman, to be spared the responsibility borne by
+men. A feeling of her being under his protection, even advice, had grown
+within him since he had discovered the death in the stable shed. This
+had not changed his aspect of blossoming youth, the intense blue candor
+of his gaze; he sat with his knees bent boyishly, his immature hands
+locked behind his head.
+
+An open wagon, piled with blankets, carried Allen to Crabapple, and Mrs.
+Kinemon and David followed in the buggy, a great bundle, folded in the
+bright quilt, roped behind. They soon crossed the range and dropped into
+a broader valley. Crabapple lay on a road leading from mountain wall to
+wall, the houses quickly thinning out into meadow at each end.
+
+A cross-roads was occupied by three stores and the courthouse, a square
+red-brick edifice with a classic white portico and high lantern; and
+it was out from that, where the highway had degenerated into a sod-cut
+trail, that the future home of the Kinemons lay. It was a small somber
+frame dwelling, immediately on the road, with a rain-washed patch rising
+abruptly at the back. A dilapidated shed on the left provided a meager
+shelter for the roan; and there was an aged and twisted apple tree over
+the broken pump.
+
+“You'll have to get at that shed, David,” his mother told him; “the
+first rain would drown anything inside.”
+
+She was settling Allen on the couch with the ragged sheepskin. So he
+would; but there was something else to attend to first. He would walk
+over to Elbow Barren, to-morrow. He involuntarily laid his hand on the
+barrel of the rifle, temporarily leaned against a table, when his mother
+spoke sharply from an inner doorway.
+
+“You David,” she said; “come right out into the kitchen.”
+
+There he stood before her, with his gaze stubbornly fixed on the bare
+floor, his mouth tight shut.
+
+“David,” she continued, her voice now lowered, fluctuating with anxiety,
+“you weren't reckoning on paying off them Hatburns? You never?” She
+halted, gazing at him intently. “Why, they'd shoot you up in no time!
+You are nothing but a--”
+
+“You can call me a boy if you've a mind to,” he interrupted; “and maybe
+the Hatburns'll kill me--and maybe they won't. But there's no one can
+hurt Allen like that and go plumb, sniggering free; not while I can move
+and hold a gun.”
+
+“I saw a look to you that was right manlike a week or two back,” she
+replied; “and I said to myself: 'There's David growing up overnight.' I
+favored it, too, though I didn't want to lose you that way so soon. And
+only last night I said again: 'Thank God, David's a man in his heart,
+for all his pretty cheeks!' I thought I could build on you, with me
+getting old and Allen never taking a mortal step. Priest would give you
+a place, and glad, in the store--the Kinemons are mighty good people. I
+had it all fixed up like that, how we'd live here and pay regular.
+
+“Oh, I didn't say nothing to your father when he started out--he was
+too old to change; but I hoped you would be different. I hoped you would
+forget your own feeling, and see Allen there on his back, and me ...
+getting along. You're all we got, David. It's no use, I reckon; you'll
+go like Allen and Hunter, full up with your own pride and never----” She
+broke off, gazing bitterly at her hands folded in her calico lap.
+
+A new trouble filled David's heart. Through the open doorway he could
+see Allen, twisting on the couch; his mother was older, more worn, than
+he had realized. She had failed a great deal in the past few days. She
+was suddenly stripped of her aspect of authority, force; suddenly she
+appeared negative, dependent. A sharp pity for her arose through his
+other contending emotions.
+
+“I don't know how you figure you will be helping Allen by stepping off
+to be shot instead of putting food in his mouth,” she spoke again. “He's
+got nobody at all but you, David.”
+
+That was so; and yet--
+
+“How can I let those skunks set their hell on us?” he demanded
+passionately. “Why, all Greenstream will think I'm afraid, that I let
+the Hatburns bust Allen and kill my father. I couldn't stand up in
+Priest's store; I couldn't bear to look at anybody. Don't you understand
+how men are about those things?”
+
+She nodded.
+
+“I can see, right enough--with Hunter in the graveyard and Allen with
+both hips broke. What I can't see is what we'll do next winter; how
+we'll keep Allen warm and fed. I suppose we can go to the County Home.”
+
+But that, David knew, was as disgraceful as the other--his own mother,
+Allen, objects of public charity! His face was clouded, his hands
+clenched. It was only a chance that he would be killed; there were four
+Hatburns though. His heart, he thought, would burst with misery;
+every instinct fought for the expression, the upholding of the family
+prestige, honor. A hatred for the Hatburns was like a strangling hand at
+his throat.
+
+“I got to!” he said; but his voice was wavering; the dull conviction
+seized him that his mother was right.
+
+All the mountains would think of him as a coward--that Kinemon who
+wouldn't stand up to the men who had destroyed Allen and his father!
+
+A sob heaved in his chest; rebellious tears streamed over his thin
+cheeks. He was crying like a baby. He threw an arm up across his eyes
+and stumbled from the room.
+
+V
+
+However, he had no intention of clerking back of a counter, of getting
+down rolls of muslin, papers of buttons, for women, if it could be
+avoided. Priest's store was a long wooden structure with a painted
+façade and a high platform before it where the mountain wagons unloaded
+their various merchandise teamed from the railroad, fifty miles distant.
+The owner had a small glass-enclosed office on the left as you entered
+the store; and there David found him. He turned, gazing over his
+glasses, as the other entered.
+
+“How's Allen?” he asked pleasantly. “I heard he was bad; but we
+certainly look to have him back driving stage.”
+
+“I came to see you about that,” David replied. “Allen can't never drive
+again; but, Mr. Priest, sir, I can. Will you give me a try?”
+
+The elder ignored the question in the concern he exhibited for Allen's
+injury.
+
+“It is a cursed outrage!” he declared. “Those Hatburns will be got up,
+or my name's not Priest! We'd have them now, but the jail wouldn't keep
+them overnight, and court three months off.”
+
+David preserved a stony silence--the only attitude possible, he had
+decided, in the face of his patent dereliction.
+
+“Will you try me on the Beaulings stage?” he repeated. “I've been round
+horses all my life; and I can hold a gun straighter than Allen.”
+
+Priest shook his head negatively.
+
+“You are too light--too young,” he explained; “you have to be above a
+certain age for the responsibility of the mail. There are some rough
+customers to handle. If you only had five years more now--We are having
+a hard time finding a suitable man. A damned shame about Allen! Splendid
+man!”
+
+“Can't you give it to me for a week,” David persisted, “and see how I
+do?”
+
+They would have awarded him the position immediately, he felt, if he had
+properly attended to the Hatburns. He wanted desperately to explain his
+failure to Priest, but a dogged pride prevented. The storekeeper was
+tapping on an open ledger with a pen, gazing doubtfully at David.
+
+“You couldn't be worse than the drunken object we have now,” he
+admitted. “You couldn't hold the job permanent yet, but I might let
+you drive extra--a day or so--till we find a man. I'd like to do what I
+could for Mrs. Kinemon. Your father was a good man, a good customer....
+Come and see me again--say, day after to-morrow.”
+
+This half promise partly rehabilitated his fallen pride. There was no
+sign in the men he passed that they held him in contempt for neglecting
+to kill the Hatburns; and his mother wisely avoided the subject. She
+wondered a little at Priest's considering him, even temporarily, for
+the stage; but confined her wonder to a species of compliment. David
+sat beside Allen, while the latter, between silent spaces of suffering,
+advised him of the individual characters and attributes of the horses
+that might come under his guiding reins.
+
+It seemed incredible that he should actually be seated in the driver's
+place on the stage, swinging the heavy whip out over a team trotting
+briskly into the early morning; but there he was. There were no
+passengers, and the stage rode roughly over a small bridge of loose
+boards beyond the village. He pulled the horses into a walk on the
+mountain beyond, and was soon skirting the Gait farm, with its broad
+fields, where he had lived as a mere boy.
+
+David slipped his hand under the leather seat and felt the smooth handle
+of the revolver. Then, on an even reach, he wrapped the reins about
+the whipstock and publicly filled and lighted his clay pipe. The smoke
+drifted back in a fragrant cloud; the stage moved forward steadily and
+easily; folded in momentary forgetfulness, lifted by a feeling of mature
+responsibility, he was almost happy. But he swung down the mountain
+beyond his familiar valley, crossed a smaller ridge, and turned into a
+stony sweep rising on the left.
+
+It was Elbow Barren. In an instant a tide of bitterness, of passionate
+regret, swept over him. He saw the Hatburns' house, a rectangular bleak
+structure crowning a gray prominence, with the tender green of young
+pole beans on one hand and a disorderly barn on the other, and a blue
+plume of smoke rising from an unsteady stone chimney against an end of
+the dwelling. No one was visible.
+
+Hot tears filled his eyes as the stage rolled along past the moldy ditch
+into which Allen had fallen. The mangy curs! His grip tightened on the
+reins and the team broke into a clattering trot, speedily leaving the
+Barren behind. But the day had been robbed of its sparkle, his position
+of its pleasurable pride. He saw again his father's body on the earthen
+floor of the stable, the bridle in his stiff fingers; Allen carried into
+the house. And he, David Kinemon, had had to step back, like a coward or
+a woman, and let the Hatburns triumph.
+
+The stage drew up before the Beaulings post-office in the middle of the
+afternoon. David delivered the mail bags, and then led the team back
+to a stable on the grassy verge of the houses clustered at the end
+of tracks laid precariously over a green plain to a boxlike station.
+Beaulings had a short row of unpainted two-story structures, the single
+street cut into deep muddy scars; stores with small dusty windows;
+eating houses elevated on piles; an insignificant mission chapel with
+a tar-papered roof; and a number of obviously masked depots for the
+illicit sale of liquor.
+
+A hotel, neatly painted white and green, stood detached from the main
+activity. There, washing his face in a tin basin on a back porch, David
+had his fried supper, sat for a while outside in the gathering dusk,
+gazing at the crude-oil flares, the passing dark figures beyond, the
+still obscured immensity of mountain and forest. And then he went up to
+a pine sealed room, like the heated interior of a packing box, where he
+partly undressed for bed.
+
+VI
+
+The next mid-morning, descending the sharp grade toward Elbow Barren,
+there was no lessening of David's bitterness against the Hatburns. The
+flavor of tobacco died in his mouth, he grew unconscious of the lurching
+heavy stage, the responsibility of the mail, all committed to his care.
+A man was standing by the ditch on the reach of scrubby grass that fell
+to the road; and David pulled his team into the slowest walk possible.
+It was his first actual sight of a Hatburn. He saw a man middling
+tall, with narrow high shoulders, and a clay-yellow countenance,
+extraordinarily pinched through the temples, with minute restless black
+eyes. The latter were the only mobile feature of his slouching indolent
+pose, his sullen regard. He might have been a scarecrow, David thought,
+but for that glittering gaze.
+
+The latter leaned forward, the stage barely moving, and looked
+unwaveringly at the Hatburn beyond. He wondered whether the man knew
+him--David Kinemon? But of course he did; all the small details of
+mountain living circulated with the utmost rapidity from clearing to
+clearing. He was now directly opposite the other; he could take out the
+revolver and kill that Hatburn, where he stood, with one precise shot.
+His hand instinctively reached under the seat. Then he remembered Allen,
+forever dependent on the couch; his mother, who had lately seemed so
+old. The stage was passing the motionless figure. David drew a deep
+painful breath, and swung out his whip with a vicious sweep.
+
+His pride, however, returned when he drove into Crabapple, down the
+familiar street, past the familiar men and women turning to watch him,
+with a new automatic measure of attention, in his elevated position. He
+walked back to his dwelling with a slight swagger of hips and shoulders,
+and, with something of a flourish, laid down the two dollars he had been
+paid for the trip to Beaulings.
+
+“I'm to drive again to-morrow,” he stated to his mother and Allen;
+“after that Priest has a regular man. I suppose, then, I'll have to go
+into the store.”
+
+The last seemed doubly difficult now, since he had driven stage. As he
+disposed of supper, eating half a pie with his cracklings and greens,
+his mother moved from the stove to the table, refilled his plate, waved
+the paper streamers of the fly brush above his head, exactly as she had
+for his father. Already, he assured himself, he had become a man.
+
+The journey to Beaulings the following day was an unremarkable replica
+of the one before. He saw no Hatburns; the sun wheeled from east to
+west at apparently the same speed as the stage; and Beaulings held its
+inevitable surge of turbulent lumbermen, the oil flares made their lurid
+note on the vast unbroken starry canopy of night.
+
+The morning of his return was heavy with a wet low vapor. The mail bags,
+as he strapped them to the rear rack, were slippery; the dawn was a
+slow monotonous widening of dull light. There were no passengers for
+Crabapple, and David, with his coat collar turned up about his throat,
+urged the horses to a faster gait through the watery cold.
+
+The brake set up a shrill grinding, and then the stage passed Elbow
+Barren in a smart rattle and bumping.
+
+After that David slowed down to light his pipe. The horses willingly
+lingered, almost stopping; and, the memory of the slippery bags at the
+back of his head, David dismounted, walked to the rear of the stage.
+
+A chilling dread swept through him as he saw, realized, that one of the
+Government sacks was missing. The straps were loose about the remaining
+two; in a minute or more they would have gone. Panic seized him, utter
+misery, at the thought of what Priest, Crabapple, would say. He would be
+disgraced, contemptuously dismissed--a failure in the trust laid on him.
+
+He collected his faculties by a violent effort; the bags, he was sure,
+had been safe coming down the last mountain; he had walked part of the
+way, and he was certain that he would have noticed anything wrong. The
+road was powerful bad through the Barren....
+
+He got up into the stage, backed the team abruptly on its haunches, and
+slowly retraced his way to the foot of the descent. There was no mail
+lying on the empty road. David turned again, his heart pounding against
+his ribs, tears of mortification, of apprehension, blurring his vision.
+The bag must have fallen here in Elbow Barren. Subconsciously he stopped
+the stage. On the right the dwelling of the Hatburns showed vaguely
+through the mist. No one else could have been on the road. A troubled
+expression settled on his glowing countenance, a pondering doubt; then
+his mouth drew into a determined line.
+
+“I'll have to go right up and ask,” he said aloud.
+
+He jumped down to the road, led the horses to a convenient sapling,
+where he hitched them. Then he drew his belt tighter about his slender
+waist and took a step forward. A swift frown scarred his brow, and he
+turned and transferred the revolver to a pocket in his trousers.
+
+The approach to the house was rough with stones and muddy clumps of
+grass. A track, he saw, circled the dwelling to the back; but he walked
+steadily and directly up to the shallow portico between windows with
+hanging, partly slatted shutters. The house had been painted dark
+brown a long while before; the paint had weathered and blistered into a
+depressing harmony with the broken and mossy shingles of the roof, the
+rust-eaten and sagging gutters festooning the ragged eaves.
+
+David proceeded up the steps, hesitated, and then, his mouth firm and
+hand steady, knocked. He waited for an apparently interminable space,
+and then knocked again, more sharply. Now he heard voices within. He
+waited rigidly for steps to approach, the door to open; but in vain.
+They had heard, but chose to ignore his summons; and a swift cold anger
+mounted in him. He could follow the path round to the back; but, he told
+himself, he--David Kinemon--wouldn't walk to the Hatburns' kitchen door.
+They should meet him at the front. He beat again on the scarred wood,
+waited; and then, in an irrepressible flare of temper, kicked the door
+open.
+
+He was conscious of a slight gasping surprise at the dark moldy-smelling
+hall open before him. A narrow bare stairway mounted above, with a
+passage at one side, and on each hand entrances were shut on farther
+interiors. The scraping of a chair, talking came from the left; the
+door, he saw, was not latched. He pushed it open and entered. There
+was a movement in the room still beyond, and he walked evenly into what
+evidently was a kitchen.
+
+The first thing he saw was the mail bag, lying intact on a table. Then
+he was meeting the concerted stare of four men. One of two, so similar
+that he could not have distinguished between them, he had seen before,
+at the edge of the road. Another was very much older, taller, more
+sallow. The fourth was strangely fat, with a great red hanging mouth.
+The latter laughed uproariously, a jangling mirthless sound followed by
+a mumble of words without connective sense. David moved toward the mail
+bag:
+
+“I'm driving stage and lost those letters. I'll take them right along.”
+
+The oldest Hatburn, with a pail in his hand, was standing by an opening,
+obviously at the point of departure on a small errand. He looked toward
+the two similar men, nearer David.
+
+“Boy,” he demanded, “did you kick in my front door?”
+
+“I'm the Government's agent,” David replied. “I've got to have the mail.
+I'm David Kinemon too; and I wouldn't step round to your back door,
+Hatburn--not if there was a boiling of you!”
+
+“You'll learn you this,” one of the others broke in: “it will be the
+sweetest breath you ever draw'd when you get out that back door!”
+
+The elder moved on to the pounded earth beyond. Here, in their presence,
+David felt the loathing for the Hatburns a snake inspires--dusty brown
+rattlers and silent cottonmouths. His hatred obliterated every other
+feeling but a dim consciousness of the necessity to recover the mail
+bag. He was filled with an overpowering longing to revenge Allen; to
+mark them with the payment of his father, dead in the stable shed.
+
+His objective senses were abnormally clear, cold: he saw every detail
+of the Hatburns' garb--the soiled shirts with buttoned pockets on their
+left breasts; the stained baggy breeches in heavy boots--such boots as
+had stamped Allen into nothingness; dull yellow faces and beady eyes;
+the long black hair about their dark ears.
+
+The idiot thrust his fingers into his loose mouth, his shirt open on a
+hairy pendulous chest. The Hatburn who had not yet spoken showed a row
+of tobacco-brown broken teeth.
+
+“He mightn't get a heave on that breath,” he asserted.
+
+The latter lounged over against a set of open shelves where, David saw,
+lay a heavy rusted revolver. Hatburn picked up the weapon and turned it
+slowly in his thin grasp.
+
+“I'm carrying the mail,” David repeated, his hand on the bag. “You've
+got no call on this or on me.”
+
+He added the last with tremendous effort. It seemed unspeakable that he
+should be there, the Hatburns before him, and merely depart.
+
+“What do you think of putting the stage under a soft little strawberry
+like that?” the other inquired.
+
+For answer there was a stunning report, a stinging odor of saltpeter;
+and David felt a sharp burning on his shoulder, followed by a slow
+warmish wet, spreading.
+
+“I didn't go to do just that there!” the Hatburn who had fired
+explained. “I wanted to clip his ear, but he twitched like.”
+
+David picked up the mail bag and took a step backward in the direction
+he had come. The other moved between him and the door.
+
+“If you get out,” he said, “it'll be through the hog-wash.”
+
+David placed the bag on the floor, stirred by a sudden realization--he
+had charge of the stage, official responsibility for the mail. He was no
+longer a private individual; what his mother had commanded, entreated,
+had no force here and now. The Hatburns were unlawfully detaining him.
+
+As this swept over him, a smile lighted his fresh young cheeks, his
+frank mouth, his eyes like innocent flowers. Hatburn shot again;
+this time the bullet flicked at David's old felt hat. With his smile
+lingering he smoothly leveled the revolver from his pocket and shot the
+mocking figure in the exact center of the pocket patched on his left
+breast.
+
+David wheeled instantly, before the other Hatburn running for him, and
+stopped him with a bullet as remorselessly placed as the first. The
+two men on the floor stiffened grotesquely and the idiot crouched in a
+corner, whimpering.
+
+David passed his hand across his brow; then he bent and grasped the mail
+bag. He was still pausing when the remaining Hatburn strode into the
+kitchen. The latter whispered a sharp oath. David shifted the bag; but
+the elder had him before he could bring the revolver up. A battering
+blow fell, knocked the pistol clattering over the floor, and David
+instinctively clutched the other's wrist.
+
+The blows multiplied, beating David into a daze, through which a single
+realization persisted--he must not lose his grip upon the arm that was
+swinging him about the room, knocking over chairs, crashing against the
+table, even drawing him across the hot iron of the stove. He must hold
+on!
+
+He saw the face above him dimly through the deepening mist; it seemed
+demoniacal, inhuman, reaching up to the ceiling--a yellow giant bent on
+his destruction....
+
+His mother, years ago, lives away, had read to them--to his father and
+Allen and himself--about a giant, a giant and David; and in the end----
+
+He lost all sense of the entity of the man striving to break him against
+the wooden angles of the room; he had been caught, was twisting, in
+a great storm; a storm with thunder and cruel flashes of lightning; a
+storm hammering and hammering at him.... Must not lose his hold on--on
+life! He must stay fast against everything! It wasn't his hand gripping
+the destructive force towering above him, but a strange quality within
+him, at once within him and aside, burning in his heart and directing
+him from without.
+
+The storm subsided; out of it emerged the livid face of Hatburn; and
+then, quite easily, he pitched David back across the floor. He lay there
+a moment and then stirred, partly rose, beside the mail bag. His pistol
+was lying before him; he picked it up.
+
+The other was deliberately moving the dull barrel of a revolver up over
+his body. A sharp sense of victory possessed David, and he whispered
+his brother's name. Hatburn fired--uselessly. The other's battered lips
+smiled.
+
+Goliath, that was the giant's name. He shot easily, securely--once.
+
+Outside, the mail bag seemed weighted with lead. He swayed and staggered
+over the rough declivity to the road. It required a superhuman effort to
+heave the pack into the stage. The strap with which he had hitched the
+horses had turned into iron. At last it was untied. He clambered up to
+the enormous height of the driver's seat, unwrapped the reins from the
+whipstock, and the team started forward.
+
+He swung to the lurching of the stage like an inverted pendulum;
+darkness continually thickened before his vision; waves of sickness
+swept up to his head. He must keep the horses on the road, forward the
+Government mail!
+
+A grim struggle began between his beaten flesh, a terrible weariness,
+and that spirit which seemed to be at once a part of him and a voice.
+He wiped the blood from his young brow; from his eyes miraculously blue
+like an ineffable May sky.
+
+“Just a tol'able David,” he muttered weakly--“only just tol'able!”
+
+
+
+
+BREAD
+
+I
+
+The train rolling rapidly over the broad salt meadows thunderously
+entered the long shed of the terminal at the sea. August Turnbull rose
+from his seat in the Pullman smoking compartment and took down the
+coat hanging beside him. It was gray flannel; in a waistcoat his shirt
+sleeves were a visible heavy mauve silk, and there was a complication
+of gold chains about his lower pockets. Above the coat a finely woven
+Panama hat with a narrow brim had rested, and with that now on his head
+he moved arrogantly toward the door.
+
+He was a large man, past the zenith of life, but still vigorous in
+features and action. His face was full, and, wet from the heat, he
+mopped it with a heavy linen handkerchief. August Turnbull's gaze was
+steady and light blue; his nose was so heavy that it appeared to droop a
+little from sheer weight, almost resting on the mustache brushed out
+in a horizontal line across prominent lips; while his neck swelled in a
+glowing congestion above a wilting collar.
+
+He nodded to several men in the narrow corridor of the car; men like
+himself in luxurious summer clothes, but for the most part fatter;
+then in the shed, looking about in vain for Bernard, his son-in-law,
+he proceeded to the street, where his automobile was waiting. It was a
+glittering landaulet, folded back and open. Thrusting a wadded evening
+paper into a crevice he sank in an upholstered corner while his
+chauffeur skillfully worked out through a small confusion of similar
+motor activity. Before him a carved glass vase set in a bracket held
+smilax and yellow rosebuds, and he saw on the floor a fallen gold powder
+box.
+
+Picking it up his face was suffused by a darker tide; this was the
+result of stooping and the angry realization that in spite of his
+prohibition Louise had been using the landaulet again. She must be made
+to understand that he, her father, had an absolute authority over his
+family and property. Marriage to Bernard Foster did not relieve her
+from obedience to the head of the house. Bernard had a car as well as
+himself; yet August Turnbull knew that his son-in-law--at heart a stingy
+man--encouraged her to burn the parental gasoline in place of his own.
+Turned against the public Bernard's special quality was admirable; he
+was indeed more successful, richer, than August had been at the other's
+age; but Louise and her husband would have to recognize his precedence.
+
+They were moving faster now on a broad paved avenue bound with steel
+tracks. A central business section was left for a more unpretentious
+region--small open fruit and fish stands, dingy lodging places, drab
+corner saloons, with, at the intervals of the cross streets, fleet
+glimpses of an elevated boardwalk and the luminous space of the sea.
+Though the day was ending there was no thinning of the vaporous heat,
+and a sodden humanity, shapeless in bathing suits, was still reluctantly
+moving away from the beach.
+
+Groups of women with their hair in trailing wet wisps and short uneven
+skirts dripping on the pavements, gaunt children in scant haphazard garb
+surged across the broad avenue or with shrill admonishments stood in
+isolated helpless patches amid the swift and shining procession of
+automobiles.
+
+August Turnbull was disturbed by the sudden arrest of his progress, and
+gazing out saw the insignificant cause of delay. He had again removed
+his hat and a frown drew a visible heavy line between his eyes.
+
+“More police are needed for these crossings,” he complained to the
+chauffeur; “there is the same trouble every evening. The city shouldn't
+encourage such rabbles; they give the place a black eye.”
+
+All the immediate section, he silently continued, ought to be torn
+down and rebuilt in solid expensive structures. It made him hot and
+uncomfortable just to pass through the shabby quarter. The people in it
+were there for the excellent reason that they lacked the ambition, the
+force to demand better things. They got what they deserved.
+
+August Turnbull made an impatient movement of contempt; the world,
+success, was for the strong men, the men who knew what they wanted and
+drove for it in a straight line. There was a great deal of foolishness
+in the air at present--the war was largely responsible; though, on
+the other hand, the war would cure a lot of nonsense. But America in
+particular was rotten with sentimentality; it was that mainly which had
+involved them here in a purely European affair. Getting into it had been
+bad business.
+
+Nowhere was the nation's failing more evident than in the attitude
+toward women. It had always been maudlin; and now, long content to use
+their advantages in small ways, women would become a serious menace to
+the country generally. He had admitted their economic value--they filled
+every possible place in the large establishment of the Turnbull Bakery;
+rather, they performed all the light manual labor. There they were more
+satisfactory than men, more easily controlled--yes, and cheaper. But in
+Congress, voting, women in communities reporting on factory conditions
+were a dangerous nuisance.
+
+He had left the poorer part, and the suavity of the succeeding
+streets rapidly increased to a soothing luxury. Wide cottages
+occupied velvet-green lawns, and the women he saw were of the sort he
+approved--closely skirted creatures with smooth shoulders in transparent
+crêpe de Chine. They invited a contemplative eye, the thing for which
+they were created--a pleasure for men; that and maternity.
+
+The automobile turned toward the sea and stopped at his house midway
+in the block. It was a square dwelling painted white with a roof of
+tapestry slate, and broad awning-covered veranda on the sea. A sprinkler
+was flashing on the lawn, dripping over the concrete pavement and
+filling the air with a damp coolness. No one was visible and, leaving
+his hat and coat on a chair in an airy hall furnished in black wicker
+and flowery chintz hangings on buff walls, he descended to the basement
+dressing rooms.
+
+In his bathing suit he presented a figure of vigorous glowing
+well-being. Only the silvering hair at his temples, the fatty bulge
+across the back of his neck, and a considerable stomach indicated his
+multiplying years. He left by a lower door, and immediately after was on
+the sand. The tide was out, the lowering sun obscured in a haze, and the
+sea undulated with a sullen gleam. Two men were swimming, and farther at
+the left a woman stood in the water with arms raised to her head. It
+was cold, but August Turnbull marched out without hesitation and threw
+himself forward with an uncompromising solid splash.
+
+He swam adequately, but he had not progressed a dozen feet before he was
+conscious of a strong current sweeping him up the beach, and he regained
+his feet with an angry flourish. The other men came nearer, and he
+recognized Bernard Foster, his son-in-law, and Frederick Rathe, whose
+cottage was directly across the street from the Turnbulls'.
+
+Like August they were big men, with light hair and eyes. They were very
+strong and abrupt in their movements, they spoke in short harsh periods,
+and fingered mustaches waxed and rolled into severe points.
+
+“A gully has cut in above,” Bernard explained, indicating a point not
+far beyond them; “it's over your head. Watch where you swim.” They were
+moving away.
+
+“Are you coming over to dinner?” August Turnbull called to Bernard.
+
+“Can't,” the latter shouted; “Victorine is sick again. Too many
+chocolate sundaes.”
+
+Left alone, August dived and floated until he was thoroughly cooled;
+then he turned toward the beach. The woman, whose existence he had
+forgotten, was leaving at the same time. She approached at an angle, and
+he was admiring her slim figure when he realized that it was Miss Beggs,
+his wife's companion. He had never seen her in a bathing suit before.
+August Turnbull delayed until she was at his side.
+
+“Good evening.” Her voice was low, and she scarcely lifted her gaze from
+the sand.
+
+He wondered why--she had been in his house for a month--he had failed
+completely to notice her previously. He decided that it had been because
+she was so pale and quiet. Ordinarily he didn't like white cheeks; and
+then she had been deceptive; he had subconsciously thought of her as
+thin.
+
+She stopped and took off her rubber cap, performing that act slowly,
+while her body, in wet satin, turned like a faultless statue of
+glistening black marble.
+
+“Do you enjoy bathing in the ocean?” he asked.
+
+A momentary veiled glance accompanied her reply. “Yes,” she said;
+“though I can't swim. I like to be beaten by the waves. I like to fight
+against them.”
+
+She hesitated, then fell definitely back; and he was forced to walk on
+alone.
+
+His wife's companion! With the frown once more scoring the line between
+his eyes he satirically contrasted Miss Beggs, a servant really, and
+Emmy.
+
+II
+
+His room occupied the front corner on the sea, Emmy's was beyond; the
+door between was partly open and he could hear her moving about, but
+with a cigarette and his hair-brushes he made no acknowledgment of her
+presence.
+
+The sun was now no more than a diffused gray glow, the sea like
+unstirred molten silver. The sound of the muffled gong that announced
+dinner floated up the stairs.
+
+Below, the damask was lit both by rose silk-shaded candles and by the
+radiance of a suspended alabaster bowl. August Turnbull sat at the
+head of a table laden with silver and crystal and flowers. There were
+individual pepper mills--he detested adulterated or stale spices--carved
+goblets for water, cocktail glasses with enameled roosters, ruby goblets
+like blown flowers and little gilt-speckled liqueur glasses; there were
+knives with steel blades, knives all of silver, and gold fruit knives;
+there were slim oyster forks, entrée forks of solid design, and forks of
+filigree; a bank of spoons by a plate that would be presently removed,
+unused, for other filled plates.
+
+Opposite him Emmy's place was still empty, but his son, Morice, in the
+olive drab and bar of a first lieutenant, together with his wife, was
+already present. August was annoyed by any delay: one of the marks of
+a properly controlled household, a house admirably conscious of the
+importance of order--and obedience--was an utter promptness at the
+table. Then, silent and unsubstantial as a shadow, Emmy Turnbull slipped
+into her seat.
+
+August gazed at her with the secret resentment more and more inspired
+by her sickness. At first he had been merely dogmatic--she must recover
+under the superlative advice and attention he was able to summon for
+her. Then his impatience had swung about toward all doctors--they were
+a pack of incompetent fools, medicine was nothing more than an
+organized swindle. They had tried baths, cures, innumerable infallible
+treatments--to no purpose. Finally he had given up all effort, all hope;
+he had given her up. And since then it had been difficult to mask his
+resentment.
+
+The butler, a white jacket taking the place of the conventional somber
+black, poured four cocktails from a silver mixer and placed four dishes
+of shaved ice, lemon rosettes and minute pinkish clams before August
+Turnbull, Morice and his wife, and Miss Beggs, occupying in solitude a
+side of the table. Then he set at Mrs. Turnbull's hand a glass of milk
+thinned with limewater and an elaborate platter holding three small
+pieces of zwieback.
+
+She could eat practically nothing.
+
+It was the particular character of her state that specially upset August
+Turnbull. He was continually affronted by the spectacle of Emmy seated
+before him sipping her diluted milk, breaking her dry bread, in the
+midst of the rich plenty he provided. Damn it, he admitted, it got on
+his nerves!
+
+The sting of the cocktail whipped up his eagerness for the iced tender
+clams. His narrowed gaze rested on Emmy; she was actually seven years
+older than he, but from her appearance she might be a hundred,
+a million. There was nothing but her painfully slow movements to
+distinguish her from a mummy.
+
+The plates were again removed and soup brought on, a clear steaming
+amber-green turtle, and with it crisp wheat rolls. Morice's wife gave a
+sigh of satisfaction at the latter.
+
+“My,” she said, “they're elegant! I'm sick and tired of war bread.”
+
+She was a pinkish young woman with regular features and abundant coppery
+hair. Marriage had brought her into the Turnbull family from the
+chorus of a famous New York roof beauty show. August had been at first
+displeased, then a certain complacency had possessed him--Morice, who
+was practically thirty years old, had no source of income other than
+that volunteered by his father, and it pleased the latter to keep them
+depending uncertainly on what he was willing to do. It insured just the
+attitude from Rosalie he most enjoyed, approved, in a youthful and not
+unhandsome woman. He liked her soft scented weight hanging on his arm
+and the perfumed kiss with which she greeted him in the morning.
+
+Nevertheless, at times there was a gleam in her eyes and an expression
+at odds with the perfection of her submission; on several occasions
+Morice had approached him armed with a determination that he, August,
+knew had been injected from without, undoubtedly by Rosalie. Whatever it
+had been he quickly disposed of it, but there was a possibility that she
+might some day undertake a rebellion; and there was added zest in the
+thought of how he would totally subdue her.
+
+“It's a wonder something isn't said to you,” she continued. “They're
+awfully strict about wheat now.”
+
+“That,” August Turnbull instructed her heavily, “is a subject we needn't
+pursue.”
+
+The truth was that he would permit no interference with what so closely
+touched his comfort. He was not a horse to eat bran. His bakery--under
+inspection--conformed rigidly with the Government requirements; but he
+had no intention of spoiling his own dinners. Any necessary conservation
+could be effected at the expense of the riffraff through which he had
+driven coming from the station. Black bread was no new experience to
+them.
+
+He saw that Miss Beggs' small white teeth were crushing salted cashew
+nuts. Noticing her in detail for the first time he realized that she
+enormously appreciated good food. Why in thunder, since she ate so
+heartily, didn't she get fat and rosy! She was one of the thin kind--yet
+not thin, he corrected himself. Graceful. Why, she must weigh a hundred
+and twenty-five pounds; and she wasn't tall.
+
+The butler filled his ruby goblet from a narrow bottle of Rhine wine. It
+was exactly right, not sweet but full; and the man held for his choice a
+great platter of beef, beautifully carved into thick crimson slices; the
+bloodlike gravy had collected in its depression and he poured it over
+his meat.
+
+“A piece of this,” he told Emmy discontentedly, “would set you right up;
+put something in your veins besides limewater.”
+
+She became painfully upset at once and fumbled in her lap, with her face
+averted, as the attention of the table was momentarily directed at her.
+There was an uncontrollable tremor of her loose colorless mouth.
+
+What a wife for him, August Turnbull! The stimulants and rich flavors
+and roast filled him with a humming vitality; he could feel his heart
+beat--as strong, he thought, as a bell. In a way Emmy had deceived
+him--she probably had always been fragile, but was careful to conceal
+it from him at their marriage. It was unjust to him. He wished that she
+would take her farcical meals in her room, and not sit here--a skeleton
+at the feast. Positively it made him nervous to see her--spoiled his
+pleasure.
+
+It had become worse lately; he had difficulty in putting her from his
+mind; he imagined Emmy in conjunction with the bakery, of her slowly
+starving and the thousands of loaves he produced in a day. There was
+something unnatural in such a situation; it was like a mockery at him.
+
+A vision of her came to him at the most inopportune moments, lingering
+until it drove him into a hot rage and a pounding set up at the back of
+his neck.
+
+The meat was brought back, and he had more of a sweet boiled huckleberry
+pudding. A salad followed, with a heavy Russian dressing. August
+Turnbull's breathing grew thicker, he was conscious of a familiar
+oppression. He assaulted it with fresh wine.
+
+“I saw Bernard on the beach,” he related; “Victorine is sick once more.
+Chocolate sundaes, Bernard said. She is always stuffing herself at
+soda-water counters or with candy. They oughtn't to allow it; the child
+should be made to eat at the table. When she is here she touches nothing
+but the dessert. When I was ten I ate everything or not at all.
+But there is no longer any discipline, not only with children but
+everywhere.”
+
+“There is a little freedom, though,” Rosalie suggested.
+
+His manner clearly showed displeasure, almost contempt, and he turned
+to Miss Beggs. “What do you think?” he demanded. “I understand you have
+been a school-teacher.”
+
+“Oh, you are quite right,” she responded; “at least about children, and
+it is clear from them that most parents are idiotically lax.” A blaze of
+discontent, loathing, surprisingly invaded her pallid face.
+
+“A rod of iron,” August recommended.
+
+The contrast between his wife and Miss Beggs recurred, intensified--one
+an absolute wreck and the other as solidly slender as a birch tree. Fate
+had played a disgusting trick on him. In the prime of his life he was
+tied to a hopeless invalid. It put an unfair tension on him. Women were
+charming, gracious--or else they were nothing. If Emmy's money had been
+an assistance at first he had speedily justified its absorption in the
+business. She owed him, her husband, everything possible. He suddenly
+pictured mountains of bread, bread towering up into the clouds, fragrant
+and appetizing; and Emmy, a thing of bones, gazing wistfully at it.
+August Turnbull, with a feeling like panic, brushed the picture from his
+mind.
+
+The dessert was apparently a bomb of frozen coffee, but the center
+revealed a delicious creamy substance flaked with pistache. The cold
+sweet was exactly what he craved, and he ate it rapidly in a curious
+mounting excitement. With the coffee he fingered the diminutive glass
+of golden brandy and a long dark roll of oily tobacco. He lighted this
+carefully and flooded his head with the coiling bluish smoke. Rosalie
+was smoking a cigarette--a habit in women which he noisily denounced.
+She extinguished it in an ash tray, but his anger lingered, an
+unreasoning exasperation that constricted his throat. Sharply aware of
+the sultriness of the evening he went hastily out to the veranda.
+
+Morice following him with the evening paper volunteered, “I see German
+submarines are operating on the Atlantic coast.”
+
+His father asserted: “This country is due for a lesson. It was anxious
+enough to get into trouble, and now we'll find how it likes some severe
+instruction. All the news here is bluff--the national asset. What I hope
+is that business won't be entirely ruined later.”
+
+“The Germans will get the lesson,” Rosalie unexpectedly declared at his
+shoulder.
+
+“You don't know what you're talking about,” he replied decidedly. “The
+German system is a marvel, one of the wonders of civilization.”
+
+She turned away, lightly singing a line from one of her late numbers:
+“I've a Yankee boy bound for Berlin.”
+
+Morice stirred uneasily. “They got a Danish tanker somewhere off
+Nantucket,” he continued impotently.
+
+August Turnbull refused to be drawn into further speech; he inhaled his
+cigar with a replete bodily contentment. The oppression of dinner was
+subsiding. His private opinion of the war was that it would end without
+a military decision--he regarded the German system as unsmashable--and
+then, with France deleted and England swamped in internal politics, he
+saw an alliance of common sense between Germany and the United States.
+The present hysteria, the sentimentality he condemned, could not
+continue to stand before the pressure of mercantile necessity. After
+all, the entire country was not made up of fools.
+
+Morice and his wife wandered off to the boardwalk, and he, August,
+must have fallen asleep, for he suddenly sat up with a sensation of
+strangeness and dizzy vision.
+
+He rose and shook it off. It was still light, and he could see Bernard
+at his automobile, parked before the latter's cottage.
+
+The younger man caught sight of August at the same moment and called:
+“We are going to a cafe with the Rathes; will you come?”
+
+He was still slightly confused, his head full, and the ride, the gayety
+of the crowd, he thought, would do him good.
+
+“Be over for you,” the other added; and later he was crowded into a rear
+seat between Louise, his daughter, and Caroline Rathe.
+
+Louise was wearing the necklace of platinum and diamonds Bernard Foster
+had given her last Christmas. It was, August admitted to himself,
+a splendid present, and must have cost eighteen or twenty thousand
+dollars. The Government had made platinum almost prohibitive. In things
+of this kind--the adornment of his wife, of, really, himself, the
+extension of his pride--Bernard was extremely generous. It was in the
+small affairs such as gasoline that he was prudent.
+
+Both Caroline Rathe and Louise were handsome women handsomely dressed;
+he was seated in a nest of soft tulle and ruffled embroidery, of pliant
+swaying bodies. Their satin-shod feet had high sharp insteps in films
+of black lace and their fingers glittered with prismatic stones. Bernard
+was in front with the chauffeur, and Frederick Rathe occupied a small
+seat at the knees of the three others. He had not made his money, as had
+August and Bernard, but inherited it with a huge brewery. Frederick was
+younger than the other men too; but his manner was, if anything, curter.
+He said things about the present war that made even August Turnbull
+uneasy.
+
+He was an unusual youth, not devoted to sports and convivial
+pleasures--as any one might infer, viewing his heavy frame and
+wealth--but something of a reader. He quoted fragments from
+philosophical books about the will-to-power and the _Uebermensch_
+that stuck like burrs in August Turnbull's memory, furnishing him with
+labels, backing, for many of his personally evolved convictions and
+experience.
+
+They were soon descending the steps to the anteroom of the café, where
+the men left their hats and sticks. As they entered the brilliantly
+lighted space beyond a captain hurried forward. “Good evening,
+gentlemen,” he said servilely; “Mr. Turnbull----”
+
+He ushered them to a table by the rope of an open floor for dancing and
+removed a reserved card. There he stood attentively with a waiter at his
+shoulder.
+
+“What will you have?” Frederick Rathe asked generally. “For me nothing
+but beer. Not the filthy American stuff.” He turned to the servants. “If
+you still have some of the other. You understand?”
+
+“No beer for me!” Louise exclaimed.
+
+“Champagne,” the captain suggested.
+
+She agreed, but Caroline had a fancy for something else. August Turnbull
+preferred a Scotch whisky and soda. The café was crowded; everywhere
+drinking multiplied in an illuminated haze of cigarettes. A slight
+girl in an airy slip and bare legs was executing a furious dance with a
+powdered youth on the open space. The girl whirled about her partner's
+head, a rigid shape in a flutter of white.
+
+They stood limply answering the rattle of applause that followed. A
+woman in an extravagantly low-cut gown took their place, singing. There
+was no possibility of mistaking her allusions; August smiled broadly,
+but Louise and Caroline Rathe watched her with an unmoved sharp
+curiosity. In the same manner they studied other women in the cafe; more
+than once August Turnbull hastily averted his gaze at the discovery that
+his daughter and he were intent upon the same individual.
+
+“The U-boats are at it again,” Bernard commented in a lowered voice.
+
+“And, though it is war,” Frederick added, “every one here is squealing
+like a mouse. 'Ye are not great enough to know of hatred and envy,'” he
+quoted. “'It is the good war which halloweth every cause.'”
+
+“I wish you wouldn't say those things here,” his wife murmured.
+
+“'Thou goest to women?'” he lectured her with mock solemnity. “'Do not
+forget thy whip!'”
+
+The whisky ran in a burning tide through August Turnbull's senses. His
+surroundings became a little blurred, out of focus; his voice sounded
+unfamiliar, as though it came from somewhere behind him. Fresh buckets
+of wine were brought, fresh, polished glasses. His appetite revived, and
+he ordered caviar. Beyond, a girl in a snake-like dress was breaking a
+scarlet boiled lobster with a nut cracker; her cigarette smoked on the
+table edge. Waiters passed bearing trays of steaming food, pitchers of
+foaming beer, colorless drinks with bobbing sliced limes, purplish sloe
+gin and sirupy cordials. Bernard's face was dark and there was a splash
+of champagne on his dinner shirt. Louise was uncertainly humming a
+fragment of popular song. The table was littered with empty plates and
+glasses. Perversely it made August think of Emmy, his wife, and acute
+dread touched him at the mockery of her wasting despair.
+
+III
+
+The following morning, Thursday, August Turnbull was forced to go into
+the city. He drove to the Turnbull Bakery in a taxi and dispatched his
+responsibilities in time for luncheon uptown and an early afternoon
+train to the shore. The bakery was a consequential rectangle of brick,
+with the office across the front and a court resounding with the
+shattering din of ponderous delivery trucks. All the vehicles, August
+saw, bore a new temporary label advertising still another war bread;
+there was, too, a subsidiary patriotic declaration: “Win the War With
+Wheat.”
+
+He was, as always, fascinated by the mammoth trays of bread, the
+enormous flood of sustenance produced as the result of his energy and
+ability. Each loaf was shut in a sanitary paper envelope; the popular
+superstition, sanitation, had contributed as much as anything to his
+marked success. He liked to picture himself as a great force, a
+granary on which the city depended for life; it pleased him to think of
+thousands of people, men, women and children, waiting for his loaves or
+perhaps suffering through the inability to buy them.
+
+August left a direction for a barrel of superlative flower to be sent to
+his cottage, and then with a curious feeling of expectancy he departed.
+He was unable to grasp the cause of his sudden impatience to be again
+at the sea. On the train, in the Pullman smoking compartment, his coat
+swinging on a hook beside him, the vague haste centered surprisingly
+about the person of Miss Beggs. At first he was annoyed by the reality
+and persistence of her image; then he slipped into an unquestioning
+consideration of her.
+
+Never had he seen a more healthy being, and that alone, he told himself,
+was sufficient to account for his interest. He liked marked physical
+well-being; particularly, he added, in women. A sick wife, for example,
+was the most futile thing imaginable; a wife should exist for the
+comfort and pleasure of her husband. What little Miss Beggs--her name,
+he now remembered from the checks made out for her, was Meta Beggs--had
+said was as vigorous as herself. He realized that she had a strong,
+even rebellious personality. That, in her, however, should not be
+encouraged--an engaging submission was the becoming attitude for her
+sex.
+
+He proceeded immediately into the ocean, puffing strenuously and gazing
+about. No women could be seen. They never had any regularity of
+habit, he complained silently. After dinner--a surfeit of tenderloin
+Bordelaise--he walked up the short incline to the boardwalk, where
+on one of the benches overlooking the sparkling water he saw a slight
+familiar figure. It was Miss Beggs. Her eyes dwelt on him momentarily
+and then returned to the horizon.
+
+“You are a great deal alone,” he commented on the far end of the bench.
+
+“It's because I choose to be,” she answered sharply.
+
+An expression of displeasure was audible in his reply, “You should have
+no trouble.”
+
+“I ought to explain,” she continued, her slim hands clasped on shapely
+knees; “I mean that I can't get what I want.”
+
+“So you prefer nothing?”
+
+She nodded.
+
+“That's different,” August Turnbull declared. “Anybody could see you're
+particular. Still, it's strange you haven't met--well, one that suited
+you.”
+
+“What good would it do me--a school-teacher, and now a companion!”
+
+“You might be admired for those very things.”
+
+“Yes, by old ladies, male and female. Not men. There's just one
+attraction for them.”
+
+“Well----”
+
+She turned now and faced him with a suppressed bitter energy. “Clothes,”
+ she said.
+
+“That's nonsense!” he replied emphatically. “Dress is only incidental.”
+
+“When did you first notice me?” she demanded. “In bathing. That bathing
+suit cost more than any two of my dresses. It is absolutely right.”
+ August was confused by the keenness of her perception. It wasn't proper
+for a woman to understand such facts. He was at a loss for a reply.
+“Seven men spoke to me in it on one afternoon. It is no good for you
+to try to reassure me with platitudes; I know better. I ought to, at
+least.”
+
+August Turnbull was startled by the fire of resentment smoldering under
+her still pale exterior. Why, she was like a charged battery. If he
+touched her, he thought, sparks would fly. She was utterly different
+from Emmy, as different as a live flame from ashes.
+
+It was evident that having at last spoken she intended to unburden
+herself of long-accumulated passionate words.
+
+“All my life I've had to listen to and smile sweetly at ridiculous
+hypocrisies. I have had to teach them and live them too. But now I'm so
+sick of them I can't keep it up a month longer. I could kill some one,
+easily. In a world where salvation for a woman is in a pair of slippers
+I have to be damned. If I could have kept my hair smartly done up and
+worn sheer batiste do you suppose for a minute I'd be a companion to
+Mrs. Turnbull? I could be going out to the cafes in a landaulet.”
+
+“And looking a lot better than most that do,” he commented without
+premeditation.
+
+She glanced at him again, and he saw that her eyes were gray, habitually
+half closed and inviting.
+
+“I've had frightfully bad luck,” she went on; “once or twice when
+it seemed that I was to have a chance, when it appeared
+brighter--everything went to pieces.”
+
+“Perhaps you want too much,” he suggested.
+
+“Perhaps,” she agreed wearily; “ease and pretty clothes and--a man.” She
+added the latter with a more musical inflection than he had yet heard.
+
+“Of course,” he proceeded importantly, “there are not a great many men.
+At least I haven't found them. As you say, most people are incapable of
+any power or decision. I always maintain it's something in the country.
+Now in----” He stopped, re-began: “In Europe they are different. There a
+man is better understood, and women as well.”
+
+“I have never been out of America,” Miss Beggs admitted.
+
+“But you might well have been,” he assured her; “you are more
+Continental than any one else I can think of.”
+
+He moved toward the middle of the bench and she said quickly: “You must
+not misunderstand. I am not cheap nor silly. It might have been better
+for me.” She addressed the fading light on the sea. “Silly women, too,
+do remarkably well. But I am not young enough to change now.” She rose,
+gracefully drawn against space; her firm chin was elevated and her hands
+clenched. “I won't grow old this way and shrivel like an apple,” she
+half cried.
+
+It would be a pity, he told himself, watching her erect figure diminish
+over the boardwalk. He had a feeling of having come in contact with an
+extraordinarily potent force. By heaven, she positively crackled! He
+smiled, thinking of the misguided people who had employed her, ignorant
+of all that underlay that severe prudent manner. At the same time he was
+flattered that she had confided in him. It was clear she recognized
+that he, at least, was a man. He was really sorry for her--what an
+invigorating influence she was!
+
+She had spoken of being no longer young--something over thirty-five he
+judged--and that brought the realization that he was getting on. A few
+years now, ten or twelve, and life would be behind him. It was a
+rare and uncomfortable thought. Usually he saw himself as at the most
+desirable age--a young spirit tempered by wisdom and experience. But
+in a flash he read that his prime must depart; every hour left was
+priceless.
+
+The best part of this must be dedicated to a helpless invalid; a strong
+current of self-pity set through him. But it was speedily lost in a more
+customary arrogance. August Turnbull repeated the favorite aphorisms
+from Frederick Rathe about the higher man. If he believed them at all,
+if they applied to life in general they were equally true in connection
+with his home; in short--his wife. Emmy Turnbull couldn't really be
+called a wife. There should be a provision to release men from such
+bonds.
+
+It might be that the will-to-power would release itself. In theory
+that was well enough, but practically there were countless small
+difficulties. The strands of life were so tied in, one with another.
+Opinion was made up of an infinite number of stupid prejudices. In
+short, no way presented itself of getting rid of Emmy.
+
+His mind returned to Meta Beggs. What a woman she was! What a triumph to
+master her contemptuous stubborn being!
+
+IV
+
+At least, August reflected with a degree of comfort at breakfast,
+Emmy didn't come down in the morning; she hadn't enough strength. He
+addressed himself to the demolishment of a ripe Cassaba melon. It melted
+in his mouth to the consistency of sugary water. His coffee cup had a
+large flattened bowl, and pouring in the ropy cream with his free hand
+he lifted the silver cover of a dish set before him. It held spitted
+chicken livers and bacon and gave out an irresistible odor. There were,
+too, potatoes chopped fine with peppers and browned; and hot delicately
+sweetened buns. He emptied two full spits, renewed his coffee and
+finished the potatoes.
+
+With a butter ball at the center of a bun he casually glanced at the
+day's paper. The submarines, he saw, were operating farther south. A
+small passenger steamer, the _Veronica_ had been torpedoed outside the
+Delaware Capes.
+
+A step sounded in the hall, and Louise entered the dining room, clad
+all in white with the exception of a closely fitting yellow hat. After
+a moment Victorine, a girl small for her age, with a petulant satiated
+expression, followed.
+
+“It's a shame,” Louise observed, “that with Morice and his wife in the
+cottage you have to breakfast alone. I suppose all those theatrical
+people get up at noon.”
+
+“Not quite,” Rosalie told her from the doorway.
+
+Louise made no reply other than elevating her brows. Victorine looked at
+the other with an exact mirroring of her mother's disdain.
+
+“Good morning,” Morice said indistinctly, hooking the collar of his
+uniform. “It's a bloody nuisance,” he asserted. “Why can't they copy the
+English jacket?”
+
+“It is much better looking,” Louise added.
+
+“Well,” Rosalie proclaimed, “I'm glad to see Morice in any; even if it
+means nothing more than a desk in the Quartermaster's Department.”
+
+“That is very necessary,” August Turnbull spoke decidedly.
+
+“Perhaps,” she agreed.
+
+“I think it is bad taste to raise such insinuations.” Louise was severe.
+
+“An army,” August put in, “travels on its stomach. As Louise
+suggests--we must ask you not to discuss the question in your present
+tone.” Morice's wife half-audibly spoke into her melon, and his face
+reddened. “What did I understand you to say?” he demanded.
+
+“Oh, 'Swat the fly!'” Rosalie answered hardily.
+
+“Not at all!” he almost shouted. “What you said was 'Swat the Kaiser!'”
+
+“Well, swat him!”
+
+“It was evident, also, that you did not refer to the Emperor of
+Germany--but to me.”
+
+“You said it,” she admitted vulgarly. “If any house ever had a
+Hohenzollern this has.”
+
+“Shut up, Rosalie!” her husband commanded, perturbed; “you'll spoil
+everything.”
+
+“It might be better if she continued,” Louise Foster corrected him.
+“Perhaps then we'd learn something of this--this beauty.”
+
+“I got good money for my face anyhow,” Rosalie asserted. “And no cash
+premium went with it either. As for going on, I'll go.” She turned to
+August Turnbull: “I've been stalling round here for nearly a year with
+Morice scared to death trying to get a piece of change out of you. Now
+I'm through; I've worked hard for a season's pay, but this is slavery.
+What you want is an amalgamated lady bootblack and nautch dancer. You're
+a joke to a free white woman. I'm sorry for your wife. She ought to slip
+you a bichloride tablet. If it was worth while I'd turn you over to the
+authorities for breaking the food regulations.”
+
+She rose, unceremoniously shoving back her chair. “For a fact, I'm tired
+of watching you eat. You down as much as a company of good boys on the
+march. Don't get black in the face; I'd be afraid to if I were you.”
+
+August Turnbull's rage beat like a hammer at the base of his head. He,
+too, rose, leaning forward with his napkin crumpled in a pounding fist.
+
+“Get out of my house!” he shouted.
+
+“That's all right enough,” she replied; “the question is--is Morice
+coming with me? Is that khaki he has on or a Kate Greenaway suit?”
+
+Morice looked from one to the other in obvious dismay. He had a pleasant
+dull face and a minute spiked mustache on an irresolute mouth.
+
+“If you stay with me,” she warned him further, “I'll have you out of
+that grocery store and into a trench.”
+
+“Pleasant for you, Morice,” Louise explained.
+
+“Things were so comfortable, Rosalie,” he protested despairingly. “What
+in the name of sense made you stir this all up? The governor won't do a
+tap for us now.”
+
+His wife stood by herself, facing the inimical Turnbull front, while
+Morice wavered between.
+
+“If you'll get along,” the former told him, “I can make a living till
+you come back. We can do without any Trübner money. I'm not a lot at
+German, but I guess you can understand me,” she again addressed August.
+“Not that I blame you for the change, such as it is.”
+
+“I'll have to go with her,” Morice unhappily declared.
+
+August Turnbull's face was stiff with congestion. The figures before him
+wavered in a sort of fog. He put out a hand, supporting himself on the
+back of his chair.
+
+“Get out of my house,” he repeated in a hoarse whisper.
+
+Fortunately Morice's leave had come to an end, and Rosalie and he
+withdrew in at least the semblance of a normal departure. August's rage
+changed to an indignant surprise, and he established himself with a
+rigid dignity on the veranda. There, happening on a cigar that burned
+badly, he was reduced to a state of further self-commiseration. That is,
+he dwelt on the general deterioration of the world about him. There was
+no discipline; there was no respect; authority was laughed at. All this
+was the result of laxness, of the sentimentality he condemned; a firmer
+hand was needed everywhere.
+
+He turned with relief to the contemplation of Meta Beggs; she was
+enormously satisfactory to consider. August watched her now with the
+greatest interest; he even sat in his wife's room while her companion
+moved silently and gracefully about. Miss Beggs couldn't have noticed
+this, for scarcely ever did her gaze meet his; she had a habit of
+standing lost in thought, her slimness a little drooping, as if she
+were weary or depressed. She was in his mind continually--Miss Beggs and
+Emmy, his wife.
+
+The latter had a surprising power to disturb him; lately he had even
+dreamed of her starving to death in the presence of abundant food. He
+began to be superstitious about it, to think of her in a ridiculous
+nervous manner as an evil design on his peace and security. She seemed
+unnatural with her shrunken face bowed opposite him at the table. His
+feeling for her shifted subconsciously to hatred. It broke out publicly
+in sardonic or angry periods under which she would shrink away,
+incredibly timid, from his scorn. This quality of utter helplessness
+gave the menace he divined in her its illusive air of unreality. She
+seemed--she was--entirely helpless; a prematurely aged woman, of the
+mildest instincts, dying of malnutrition.
+
+Miss Beggs now merged into all his daily life, his very fiber. He
+regarded her in an attitude of admirable frankness. “Still it is
+extraordinary you haven't married.”
+
+The tide was out, it was late afternoon, and they were walking over the
+hard exposed sand. Whenever she came on a shell she crushed it with a
+sharp heel.
+
+“There were some,” she replied indifferently.
+
+He nodded gravely. “It would have to be a special kind of man,” he
+agreed. “An ordinary individual would be crushed by your personality.
+You'd need a firm hand.”
+
+Her face was inscrutable. “I have always had the misfortune to be too
+late,” she told him.
+
+“I wish I had known you sooner!” he exclaimed.
+
+Her arms, in transparent sleeves, were like marble. His words
+crystallized an overwhelming realization of how exactly she was
+suited to him. The desire to shut her will in his hand increased a
+thousandfold.
+
+“Yes,” she said, “I would have married you. But there's no good
+discussing it.” She breathed deeply with a sinking forward of her
+rounded shoulders. All her vigor seemed to have left her. “I have been
+worried about Mrs. Turnbull lately,” she went on. “Perhaps it's my
+imagination--does she look weaker to you?”
+
+“I haven't noticed,” he answered brusquely.
+
+Curiously he had never thought of Emmy as dying; she appeared eternal,
+without the possibility of offering him the relief of such freedom as
+yet remained. Freedom for--for Meta Beggs.
+
+“The doctor was at the cottage again Thursday,” she informed him. “I
+didn't hear what he said.”
+
+“Humbugs,” August Turnbull pronounced.
+
+A sudden caution invaded him. It would be well not to implicate himself
+too far with his wife's companion. She was a far shrewder woman than was
+common; there was such a thing as blackmail. He studied her privately.
+Damn it, what a pen he had been caught in! Her manner, too, changed
+immediately, as though she had read his feeling.
+
+“I shall have to go back.”
+
+She spoke coldly. A moment before she had been close beside him, but now
+she might as well have been miles away.
+
+V
+
+The fuse of the electric light in the dining room burned out, and dinner
+proceeded with only the illumination of the silk-hooded candles. In the
+subdued glow Meta Beggs was infinitely attractive. His wife's place was
+empty. Miss Beggs had brought apologetic word from Emmy that she felt
+too weak to leave her room. A greater degree of comfort possessed August
+Turnbull than he had experienced for months. With no one at the table
+but the slim woman on the left and himself a positive geniality radiated
+from him. He pressed her to have more champagne--he had ordered that
+since she preferred it to Rhine wine--urged more duckling, and ordered
+the butler to leave the brandy decanter before them.
+
+She laughed--a rare occurrence--and imitated, for his intense amusement,
+Mrs. Frederick Rathe's extreme cutting social manner. He drank more than
+he intended, and when he rose his legs were insecure. He made his way
+toward Meta Beggs. She stood motionless, her thin lips like a thread of
+blood on her tense face.
+
+“What a wife you'd make!” he muttered.
+
+There was a discreet cough at his back, and swinging about he saw a maid
+in a white starched cap and high cuffs.
+
+“Excuse me, sir,” she said; “Mrs. Turnbull wants to know would you
+please come up to her room.”
+
+He swayed slightly, glowering at her with a hot face in which a vein
+throbbed persistently at his temple. Miss Beggs had disappeared.
+
+“Very well,” he agreed heavily.
+
+Mounting the stairs he fumbled for his cigar case, and entered the
+chamber beyond his, clipping the end from a superlative perfecto.
+
+Emmy was in bed, propped up on a bank of embroidered pillows. A light
+from one side threw the shadow of her head on a wall in an animated
+caricature of life.
+
+“I didn't want to disturb you, August.”
+
+Her voice was weak and apologetic. He stood irritably beside her.
+
+“It's hot in here.” His wife at once detected whatever assaulted his
+complete comfort. She fell into a silence that strained his patience to
+the utmost.
+
+When at last she spoke it was in a tone of voice he had never heard from
+her--impersonal, with at the same time a note of fear like the flutter
+of a bird's wing.
+
+“The doctor has been here two or three times lately. I didn't want to
+bother you, and he said----”
+
+She broke off, and her hand raised from her side in a gesture of
+seeking. He held it uncomfortably, wishing that the occasion would
+speedily end.
+
+“August, I've--I've got to leave you.”
+
+He did not comprehend her meaning, and stood stupidly looking down at
+her spent face. “I'm going to die, August, almost any time now. I wanted
+to tell you first when we were quietly together; and then Louise and
+Bernard must know.”
+
+His sensations were so confused, the mere shock of such an announcement
+had so confounded him that he was unable to penetrate the meaning of the
+sudden expansion of his blood. His attention strayed from the actuality
+of his wife to the immaterial shadow wavering on the wall. There Emmy's
+profile, grotesquely enlarged and sharpened, grimaced at him. August
+Turnbull's feelings disentangled and grew clearer, there was a
+conventional memory of his wife as a young woman, the infinitely sharper
+realization that soon he must be free, a vision of Meta Beggs as she had
+been at dinner that night, and intense relief from nameless strain.
+
+He moved through the atmosphere of suspense that followed the knowledge
+of Emmy's condition with a feeling of being entirely apart from his
+family. Out of the chaos of his emotions the sense of release was most
+insistent. Naturally he couldn't share it with any one else, not at
+present. He avoided thinking directly of Meta Beggs, partly from the
+shreds of the superstitious dread that had once colored his attitude
+toward his wife and partly from the necessity to control what otherwise
+would sweep him into a resistless torrent. However, most of his
+impatience had vanished--a little while now, and in a discreet manner he
+could grasp all that he had believed so hopelessly removed.
+
+Except for the occasions of Louise's informal presence he dined alone
+with Miss Beggs. They were largely silent, attacking their plates with
+complete satisfaction. On the day of her monthly payment he drew the
+check for a thousand dollars in place of the stipulated hundred, and
+gave it to her without comment. She nodded, managing to convey entire
+understanding and acceptance of what it forecast. Once, at the table, he
+called her Meta.
+
+She deliberated a reply--he had asked her opinion about British bottled
+sauces--but when she answered she called him Mr. Turnbull. This, too,
+pleased him. She had an unerring judgment in the small affairs of
+deference. Dinner had been better than usual, and he realized he had
+eaten too much. His throat felt constricted, he had difficulty in
+swallowing a final gulp of coffee; the heavy odors of the dining room
+almost sickened him.
+
+“We'll get out on the beach,” he said abruptly; “a little air.”
+
+They proceeded past the unremitting sprinklers on the strip of lawn to
+the wide gray sweep of sand. At that hour no one else was visible, and
+a new recklessness invaded his discomfort. “You see,” he told her, “that
+bad luck of yours isn't going to hold.”
+
+“It seems incredible,” she murmured. She added without an appearance of
+the least ulterior thought: “Mrs. August Turnbull.”
+
+“Exactly,” he asserted.
+
+A triumphant conviction of pleasure to come surged through him like a
+subtle exhilarating cordial.
+
+“I'll take no nonsensical airs from Louise or the Rathes,” he
+proclaimed.
+
+“Don't let that worry you,” she answered serenely.
+
+He saw that it need not, and looked forward appreciatively to a scene in
+which Meta would not come off second.
+
+Above them the long curve of the boardwalk was empty, with, behind it,
+the suave ornamental roofs of the cottages. A wind quartering from
+the shore had smoothed the ocean into the semblance of a limitless and
+placid lake. Minute waves ruffled along the beach with a continuous
+whispering, and the vault of the west, from which the sun had just
+withdrawn, was filled with light the color of sauterne wine.
+
+It was inconceivable to August Turnbull that soon Emmy would be gone out
+of his life. He shook his thick shoulders as if by a gesture to unburden
+himself of her unpleasant responsibility. He smiled slightly at the
+memory of how he had come to fear her. It had been the result of the
+strain he was under; once more the vision of mountainous bread and Emmy
+returned. The devil was in the woman!
+
+“What are you smiling at?” Meta asked.
+
+“Perhaps it was because my luck, as well, has changed,” he admitted.
+
+She came close up to him, quivering with emotion.
+
+“I want everything!” she cried in a vibrant hunger; “everything! Do you
+understand? Are you willing? I'm starved as much as that woman up in her
+bed. Can you give me all the gayety, all the silks and emeralds there
+are in the world?”
+
+He patted her shoulder. “You'll look like a Christmas tree. When this
+damned war is over we will go to Europe, to Berlin and Munich. They have
+the finest streets and theaters and cafés in the world. There things are
+run by men for men. The food is the best of all--no French fripperies,
+but solid rare cuts. Drinking is an art----”
+
+“What is that out in the water?” she idly demanded.
+
+He gazed impatiently over the unscored tide and saw a dark infinitesimal
+blot.
+
+“I have been watching it for a long while,” she continued. “It's coming
+closer, I think.”
+
+He again took up his planning.
+
+“We'll stay two or three years; till things get on their feet here. Turn
+the bakery into a company. No work, nothing but parties.”
+
+“Do look!” she repeated. “It's coming in--a little boat. I suppose it is
+empty.”
+
+The blot was now near enough for him to distinguish its outline. As Meta
+said, no one was visible. It was drifting. Against his wish his gaze
+fastened on the approaching boat. It hesitated, appeared to swing away,
+and then resumed the progress inshore.
+
+“I believe it will float into that cut in the beach below,” he told her.
+
+His attention was divided between the craft and the image of all
+the pleasures he would introduce to Meta--Turnbull. It was a lucky
+circumstance that he had plenty of money, for he realized that she would
+not marry a poor man. This was not only natural but commendable. Poor
+men were fools, too weak for success; only the strong ate white bread
+and had fine women, only the masterful conquered circumstance.
+
+“Come,” she said, catching his hand; “it's almost here.”
+
+She half pulled him over the glistening wet sand to where the deeper
+water thrust into the beach. Her interest was now fully communicated to
+him.
+
+“We must drag it safely up,” he articulated, out of breath from her
+eagerness. The bow swept into the onward current, it moved more
+swiftly, and then sluggishly settled against the bottom. Painted on its
+blistering white side was a name, “_Veronica_,” and “Ten persons.”
+ There was a slight movement at the rail, and a sharp unreasoning horror
+gripped August Turnbull.
+
+“Something in it,” he muttered. He wanted to turn away, to run from the
+beach; but a stronger curiosity dragged him forward. Not conscious of
+stepping through shallow water he advanced.
+
+A hunger-ravished dead face was turned to him from the bottom, a huddle
+of bony joints, dried hands. There were others--all dead, starved. In
+a red glimmer he saw the incredible travesty of a child, a lead-colored
+woman, shriveled and ageless from agony.
+
+He fell back with a choking cry, “Emmy!”
+
+There was a dull uproar in his head, and then a violent shock at the
+back of his brain. August Turnbull's body slid down into the tranquil
+ripples that ran along the boat's side.
+
+
+
+
+ROSEMARY ROSELLE
+
+
+It would be better for my purpose if you could hear the little clear
+arpeggios of an obsolete music box, the notes as sweet as barley sugar;
+for then the mood of Rosemary Roselle might steal imperceptibly into
+your heart. It is made of daguerreotypes blurring on their misted
+silver; tenebrous lithographs--solemn façades of brick with classic
+white lanterns lifted against the inky smoke of a burning city; the
+pages of a lady's book, elegant engravings of hooped and gallooned
+females; and the scent of crumbled flowers.
+
+Such intangible sources must of necessity be fragile--a perfume linked
+to a thin chime, elusive faces on the shadowy mirror of the past,
+memories of things not seen but felt in poignant unfathomable emotions.
+This is a magic different from that of to-day; here perhaps are only
+some wistful ghosts brought back among contemptuous realities--a man in
+a faded blue uniform with a face drawn by suffering long ended, a girl
+whose charm, like the flowers, is dust.
+
+It is all as remote as a smile remembered from youth. Such apparent
+trifles often hold a steadfast loveliness more enduring than the
+greatest tragedies and successes. They are irradiated by an imperishable
+romance: this is my desire--to hold out an immaterial glamour, a vapor,
+delicately colored by old days in which you may discover the romantic
+and amiable shapes of secret dreams.
+
+I
+
+It will serve us best to see Elim Meikeljohn first as he walked across
+Winthrop Common. It was very early in April and should have been
+cool, but it was warm--already there were some vermilion buds on the
+maples--and Elim's worn shad-belly coat was uncomfortably heavy. The
+coat was too big for him--his father had worn it for twenty years before
+he had given it to Elim for college--and it hung in somber greenish
+folds about his tall spare body. He carried an equally oppressive black
+stiff hat in a bony hand and exposed a gaunt serious countenance.
+
+Other young men passing, vaulting lightly over the wooden rail that
+enclosed the common, wore flowing whiskers, crisply black or brown like
+a tobacco leaf; their luxuriant waistcoats were draped with a profusion
+of chains and seals; but Elim's face was austerely shaved, he wore
+neither brocade nor gold, and he kept seriously to the path.
+
+He was, even more than usual, absorbed in a semi-gloom of thought. It
+was his birthday, he was twenty-six, and he had been married more
+than nine years. Already, with his inherited dark temperament, he was
+middle-aged in situation and feeling. He had been assistant to the
+professor of philosophy and letters for three of those married years;
+yes--he had been graduated when he was twenty-three. He arrived at an
+entrance to the common that faced the row of houses where he had his
+room, and saw that something unusual was in progress.
+
+The front of his boarding house was literally covered with young men:
+they hung over the small portico from steps to ridge, they bulged from
+every window and sat astride of the dormer windows in the roof. Before
+them on the street a camera had been set up and was covered, all save
+the snout, by a black rubber cloth, backward from which projected the
+body and limbs of the photographer.
+
+The latter, Elim realized, was one of a traveling band that took
+pictures of whatever, on their way, promised sufficient pecuniary
+return. Here the operator had been in luck--he would sell at least
+thirty photographs at perhaps fifty cents each. Harry Kaperton, a great
+swell, was in his window with his setter, Spot; his legs, clad in bags
+with tremendous checks and glossy boots, hung outward. On the veranda
+were Hinkle and Ben Willing, the latter in a stovepipe hat; others wore
+stovepipes set at a rakish angle on one ear. They were all irrepressibly
+gay, calling from roof to ground, each begging the photographer to focus
+on his own particular charm.
+
+Perhaps fifty cents--Elim Meikeljohn would have liked a place in the
+picture; he would like to possess one, to keep it as a memento of the
+youthful life that flowed constantly about him, but the probable cost
+was prohibitive. He even wished, as he paused before making his way up
+the crowded veranda steps, that some one would ask him to stay and
+have his picture taken with the rest. He delayed, hoping for the mere
+formality of this friendliness. But it was not forthcoming. He had felt
+that it wouldn't be; he had divined the careless silence with which the
+men moved aside for him to mount. There was even a muttered allusion
+to his famous Scotch thrift, contained in a sharper word. Elim didn't
+mind--actively. He had been accustomed to the utmost monetary caution
+since the first dawn of his consciousness. He had come to regard the
+careful weighing of pennies as an integral part of his being. It had
+always been necessary for the Meikeljohns, father and son, on their
+rocky pastures. He didn't mind, but at the same time he bore a faint
+resentment at the injustice of the marked and perceptible disdain of the
+majority of his fellows.
+
+They didn't understand, he told himself, still ascending to his room in
+the third floor back. Every cent that he could squeeze from his small
+salary must go back to the support of the invalid, his wife. He had
+never, of course, explained this to any one in Cambridge. They wouldn't
+be particularly interested and, in addition, his daily companions seemed
+far too young for such serious confidences. In reality Harry Kaperton
+was three years older than Elim; and Kaperton had been pleasantly at
+college, racing horses, for seven years; many others were Elim's age,
+but the maturity of the latter's responsibility separated them.
+
+In his room he took off his formal coat and nankeen waistcoat and hung
+them on a pegged board. The room was bare, with two uncurtained windows
+that afforded a glimpse of the shining river; it contained a small
+air-tight stove, now cold and black, and a wood box, a narrow bed, a
+deal table with a row of worn text-books and neatly folded papers, a
+stand for water pitcher and basin, and two split-hickory Windsor chairs.
+Now it was filled with an afternoon glow, like powdered gold, and the
+querulously sweet piping of an early robin.
+
+He dipped his face and hands in cooling water and, at the table, with
+squared elbows, addressed himself to a set task.
+
+II
+
+Elim Meikeljohn laid before him a small docket of foolscap folded
+lengthwise, each section separately indorsed in pale flowery ink, with a
+feminine name, a class number and date. They were the weekly themes of
+a polite Young Ladies' Academy in Richmond, sent regularly north for the
+impressive opinion of a member of Elim's college faculty. The professor
+of philosophy and letters had undertaken the task primarily; but, with
+the multiplication of his duties, he had turned the essays over to Elim,
+whose careful judgments had been sufficiently imposing to secure for him
+a slight additional income.
+
+He sat for a moment regarding the papers with a frown; then, with a
+sudden movement, he went over the names that headed each paper. Two he
+laid aside. They bore above their dates in March, eighteen sixty-one,
+the name Rosemary Roselle.
+
+He picked one up tentatively. It was called A Letter. Elim opened it
+and regarded its tenuous violet script. Then, with an expression of
+augmented determination, he folded it again and placed it with its
+fellow at the bottom of the heap. He firmly attacked the topmost theme.
+He read it slowly, made a penciled note in a small precise hand on
+its margin, folded it once more and marked it with a C minus. He went
+carefully through the pile, jotting occasional comments, judging the
+results with A, B or C, plus or minus. Finally only the two he had
+placed at the bottom remained.
+
+Elim took one up again, gazing at it severely. He wondered what Rosemary
+Roselle had written about--in her absurd English--this time. As he
+looked at the theme's exterior, his attention shifted from the paper
+to himself, his conscience towered darkly above him, demanding a
+condemnatory examination of his feelings and impulses.
+
+Had he not begun to look for, to desire, those essays from a doubtless
+erroneous and light young woman? Had he not even, on a former like
+occasion, awarded her effort with a B minus, when it was questionable
+if she should have had a C plus? Had his conduct not been dishonest,
+frivolous and wholly reprehensible? To all these inexorable accusations
+he was forced to confess himself guilty. He had undoubtedly, only a few
+minutes before, looked almost impatiently for something from Rosemary
+Roselle. Beyond cavil she should have had an unadorned C last month. And
+these easily proved him a broken reed.
+
+He must at once take himself in hand, flames were reaching hungrily for
+him from the pit of eternal torment. In a little more he would be damned
+beyond any redemption. He was married ... shame! His thoughts turned to
+Hester, his wife for nine and more years.
+
+Her father's farm lay next to the Meikeljohns'; the two places formed
+practically one convenient whole; and when Elim had been no more than a
+child, Meikeljohn Senior and Hester's parents had solemnly agreed upon a
+mutually satisfactory marriage. Hester had always been a thin pale slip
+of a girl, locally famous for her memory and grasp of the Scriptures;
+but it was only at her fourteenth year that her health began perceptibly
+to fail, at the same time that a succession of material mischances
+overwhelmed her family. Finally, borne down to actual privation, her
+father decided to remove to another section and opportunity. He sold his
+place for a fraction more than the elder Meikeljohn could pay ... but
+there was Hester, now an invalid; and there was the agreement that
+Meikeljohn had made when it had seemed to his advantage. The latter was
+a rigidly upright man--he accepted for his son the responsibility he
+himself had assumed, and Hester was left behind. Space in the
+Meikeljohn household was valuable, the invalid presented many practical
+difficulties, and, with the solemn concurrence of the elders of their
+church, Elim--something short of seventeen but a grave mature-seeming
+boy--and Hester were married.
+
+The winter of his marriage Elim departed for college--his father was
+a just man, who had felt obscurely that some reparation was due Elim;
+education was the greatest privilege of which Meikeljohn could conceive,
+so, at sacrifices that all grimly accepted, Elim was sent to Cambridge.
+There, when he had been graduated, he remained--there were already more
+at the Meikeljohn home than their labor warranted--assistant to the
+professor of philosophy and letters.
+
+Elim again opened the paper before him and spread it severely on the
+table. The supposititious letter, “Two, Linden Row,” opened in proper
+form and spelling, addressed to “Dearest Elizabeth.” Its progress,
+however, soon wabbled, its periods degenerated into a confusion. It
+endeavored to be casual, easy, but he judged it merely trivial. At
+one paragraph, despite his resolution of critical impersonality, his
+interest deepened:
+
+“On Thursday we have to have ready a Theme to send off to Harvard.
+Of course, every Thursday morning We, with one accord, begin to make
+excuses. Well, the Dread Day rolls around to-morrow, and consequently
+I am deep in the Slough of Despond. My only consolation is that our
+Geniuses can't write regularly, but then the mood to write never
+possesses me.... This week, in writing a comparison between Hamlet and
+Antonio, I did succeed in jotting down something, but unfortunately I
+found that I had said the same many times before, only about different
+heroes. My tale of Woe----”
+
+Elim once more took himself firmly in hand; he folded the paper
+and sharply indorsed it with a C minus. Afterward he felt decidedly
+uncomfortable. He wondered if Rosemary Roselle would be made unhappy by
+the low marking? Probably she wouldn't care; probably all that occupied
+her mind were dress and company. Possibly she danced--light, godless.
+
+The haze within deepened; he could see through the window the tops of
+the maples--they held a green sheen as if in promise of the leaves to
+follow. The robin whistled faint and clear.
+
+Possibly she danced. Carried away on the gracious flood of the
+afternoon, he wondered what Rosemary Roselle looked like. He was certain
+that she was pretty--her writing had the unconscious assurance of a
+personable being. Well, he would never know.... Rosemary Roselle--the
+name had a trick of hanging in the memory; it was astonishingly easy to
+repeat. He tried it aloud, speaking with a sudden emphasis that startled
+him. The name came back to him from the bare walls of his room like an
+appeal. Something within him stirred sharp as a knife. He rose with a
+deep breath, confused, as if some one else, unseen, had unexpectedly
+spoken.
+
+III
+
+His conscience, stirring again, projected the image of Hester, with
+her pinched glistening countenance, on his conjecturing. He resolutely
+addressed himself to the judgment of Rosemary Roselle's second
+paper, his lighter thoughts drowned in the ascending dark tide of his
+temperament It was called Our Waitress, and an instant antagonism for
+the entire South and its people swept over him.
+
+He saw that the essay's subject was a negro, a slave; and all his
+impassioned detestation of the latter term possessed him. The essence of
+the Meikeljohns was a necessity for freedom, an almost bitter pride in
+the independence of their bodies. Their souls they held to be under the
+domination of a relentless Omnipotence, evolved, it might have been,
+from the obdurate and resplendent granite masses of the highland where
+they had first survived. These qualities gave to Elim Meikeljohn's
+political enmity for the South a fervor closely resembling fanaticism.
+Even now when, following South Carolina, six other states had seceded,
+he did not believe that war would ensue; he believed that slavery would
+be abolished at a lesser price; but he was a supporter of drastic means
+for its suppression. His Christianity, if it held a book in one hand,
+grasped a sword in the other, a sword with a bright and unsparing blade
+for the wrong-doer.
+
+He consciously centered this antagonism on Rosemary Roselle; he
+visualized her as a thoughtless and capricious female, idling in vain
+luxury, cutting with a hard voice at helpless and enslaved human beings.
+He condemned his former looseness of being, his playing with insidious
+and destructive forces. A phrase, “Babylonish women,” crept into his
+mind from some old yellow page. He read:
+
+“Indy is a large light mulatto, very neat and very slow. She has not
+much Sense, but a great deal of Sensibility. Helping her proves Fatal.
+The more that is done for her the less well does she work.... Indy
+is very unfortunate: going out with a present of money she lost every
+penny. Of course she was incapable of work until the sum was replaced.”
+
+Elim paused with an impatient snort at this exhibition of shiftlessness.
+If the negroes were not soon freed they would be ruined beyond
+redemption. He read the remainder of the paper rigid and unapproving.
+It gave, he considered, such an excellent picture of Southern iniquities
+that he marked it B plus, the highest rating his responsibility had
+allowed Rosemary Roselle. Now he was certain that her very name held
+a dangerous potentiality--it came too easily to the tongue; it had a
+wanton sound like a silk skirt.
+
+The warm glow faded from the room; without, the tenuous and bare upper
+branches of the maples wavered in the oncoming dusk. The river had
+disappeared. Elim was acutely conscious of the approaching hour of
+supper; and in preparation to go out to it he donned again the nankeen
+waistcoat and solemn garment that had served his father so long and so
+well.
+
+IV
+
+The following day was almost hot; at its decline coming across Winthrop
+Common Elim was oppressed and weary. Nothing unusual was happening at
+the boarding house; a small customary group was seated on the veranda
+steps, and he joined it. The conversation hung exclusively to the
+growing tension between North and South, to the forming of a Confederate
+States of America in February, the scattered condition of the Union
+forces, the probable fate of the forts in Charleston harbor.
+
+The men spoke, according to their dispositions, with the fiery emphasis
+or gravity common to great crises. The air was charged with a sense of
+imminence, the vague discomfort of pending catastrophe. Elim listened
+without comment, his eyes narrowed, his long countenance severe. Most
+of the men had gone into Boston, to the Parker House, where hourly
+bulletins were being posted. Those on the steps rose to follow, all
+except Elim Meikeljohn--in Boston he knew money would be spent.
+
+He went within, stopping to glance through a number of lately arrived
+letters on a table and found one for himself, addressed in his father's
+painstaking script. Alone, once more without his coat, he opened the
+letter. Its beginning was commonplace--“My dear son, Elim”--but what
+followed confused him by the totally unexpected shock it contained:
+Hester, his wife, was dead.
+
+At first he was unable to comprehend the details of what had happened to
+him; the fact itself was of such disturbing significance. He had never
+considered the possibility of Hester's dying; he had come to think
+of her as a lifelong responsibility. She had seemed, in her invalid's
+chair, withdrawn from the pressure of life as it bore upon others,
+more enduring than his father's haggard concern over the increasing
+difficulties of material existence and spiritual salvation, than his
+mother's flushed toiling.
+
+Elim had lived with no horizon wider than the impoverished daily
+necessity; he had accepted this with mingled fatality and fortitude; any
+rebellion had been immediately suppressed as a wicked reflection upon
+Deity. His life had been ordered in this course; he had accepted it
+the more readily from his inherited distrust of worldly values and
+aspirations; it had, in short, been he, and now the foundations of his
+entire existence had been overthrown.
+
+He read the letter more carefully, realizing the probable necessity of
+his immediate return home for the funeral. But that was dispelled--his
+father wrote that it had been necessary to bury Hester at once. The
+elder Meikeljohn proceeded relentlessly to an exact exposition of why
+this had been done. “A black swelling” was included in the details. He
+finished:
+
+“And if it would be inconvenient for you to leave your work at this
+time it is not necessary for you to come here. In some ways it would
+be better for you to stay. There is little enough for you to do and it
+would stop your money at college.... The Lord is a swift and terrible
+Being Who worketh His will in the night.”
+
+Hester was dead. Elim involuntarily walked to a window, gazing with
+unseeing eyes at the familiar pleasant prospect. A realization flashed
+unbidden through his mind, a realization like a stab of lightning--he
+was free. He overbore it immediately, but it left within him a strange
+tingling sensation. He directed his mind upon Hester and the profitable
+contemplation of death; but rebellion sprang up within him, thoughts
+beyond control whirled in his brain.
+
+Free! A hundred impulses, desires, of which--suppressed by his rigid
+adherence to a code of duty--he had not been conscious, leaped into
+vitality. His vision of life swung from its focus upon outward and
+invisible things to a new surprising regard of his own tangible self. He
+grew aware of himself as an entity, of the world as a broad and various
+field of exploit and discovery.
+
+There was, his father had bluntly indicated, no place for him at home;
+and suddenly he realized that his duties at college had been a tedious
+grind for inconsiderable return. This admission brought to him the
+realization that he detested the whole thing--the hours in class; the
+droning negligent recitations of the men; the professor of philosophy
+and letters' pedantic display; the cramped academic spirit of the
+institution. The vague resentment he had felt at the half-concealed
+disdain of his fellows gave place to a fiery contempt for their
+majority; the covert humility he had been forced to assume--by
+the thought of Hester and the few miserable dollars of an inferior
+position--turned to a bitter freedom of opinion.
+
+The hour for supper approached and passed, but Elim did not leave his
+room. He walked from wall to wall, by turns arrogant and lost in his new
+situation. Of one thing he was certain--he would give up his occupation
+here. It might do for some sniveling sycophant of learning and money,
+but he was going forth to--what?
+
+He heard footfalls in the bare hall below, and a sudden easy desire
+for companionship seized him; he drew on the sturdy Meikeljohn coat and
+descended the stairs to the lower floor. Harry Kaperton's door was
+open and Elim saw the other moving within. He advanced, leaning in the
+doorway.
+
+“Back early,” Elim remarked. “What's new at Parker's?”
+
+Kaperton was unsuccessful in hiding his surprise at the other's
+unexpected appearance and direct question. “Why--why, nothing when
+I left;” then more cordially: “Come in, find a chair. Bottle on the
+table--oh, I didn't think.” He offered an implied apology to Elim's
+scruples.
+
+But Elim advanced to the table, where, selecting a decanter at random,
+he poured out a considerable drink of pale spirits. Harry Kaperton
+looked at him in foolish surprise.
+
+“Had no idea you indulged!” he ejaculated. “Always took you to be a
+severe Puritan duck.”
+
+“Scotch,” Elim corrected him, “Presbyterian.”
+
+He tilted the glass and the spirits sank smoothly from sight. His throat
+burned as if he had swallowed a mouthful of flame, but there was a
+quality in the strong rum that accorded with his present mood: it was
+fiery like his released sense of life. Kaperton poured himself a drink,
+elevated it with a friendly word and joined Elim.
+
+“I'm going home,” the former proceeded. “You see, I live in Maryland,
+and the situation there is getting pretty warm. We want to get our
+women out of Baltimore, and our affairs conveniently shaped, before any
+possible trouble. I had a message this evening to come at once.”
+
+The two men presented the greatest possible contrast--Harry Kaperton
+had elegantly flowing whiskers, a round young face that expressed facile
+excitement at a possible disturbance, and sporting garb of tremendous
+emphasis. Elim's face, expressing little of the tumult within, harsh and
+dark and dogged, was entirely appropriate to his somber greenish-black
+dress. Kaperton gestured toward the bottle, and they took a second
+drink, then a third.
+
+Kaperton's face flushed, he grew increasingly voluble, but Elim
+Meikeljohn was silent; the liquor made no apparent impression upon him.
+He sat across the table from the other with his legs extended straight
+before him. They emptied the decanter of spirits and turned to sherry,
+anything that was left. Kaperton apologized profoundly for the depleted
+state of his cellar--knowing that he was leaving, he had invited a party
+of men to his room the night before. He was tremendously sorry that Elim
+had been overlooked--the truth being that no one had known what a good
+companion Elim was.
+
+It seemed to Elim Meikeljohn, drinking sherry, that the night before he
+had not existed at all. He did not analyze his new being, his surprising
+potations; he was proceeding without a cautious ordering of his steps.
+It was neither a celebration nor a protest, but instinctive, like the
+indiscriminate gulping of a man who has been swimming under the water.
+
+“Why,” Kaperton gasped, “you've got a head like a cannon ball.”
+
+He rose and wandered unsteadily about, but Elim sat motionless, silent,
+drinking. He was conscious now of a drumming in his ears like distant
+martial music, a confused echo like the beat of countless feet. He
+tilted his glass and was surprised to find it empty.
+
+“It's all gone,” Kaperton said dully.
+
+He was as limp as an empty doll, Elim thought contemptuously. He, Elim,
+felt like hickory, like iron; his mind was clear, vindicative. He rose,
+sweeping back the hair from his high austere brow. Kaperton had slid
+forward in his chair with hanging open hands and mouth.
+
+The drumming in Elim's ears grew louder, a hum of voices was added to
+it, and it grew nearer, actual. A crowd of men was entering the boarding
+house, carrying about them a pressure of excited exclamations and a more
+subtle disturbance. Elim Meikeljohn left Kaperton and went out into the
+hall. An ascending man met him.
+
+“War!” he cried. “The damned rebels have assaulted and taken Sumter!
+Lincoln has called for fifty thousand volunteers!” He hurried past and
+left Elim grasping the handrail of the stair.
+
+War! The word carried an overwhelming significance to his mind dominated
+by the intangible drumming, to his newly released freedom. War upon
+oppression, upon the criminal slaveholders of the South! He descended
+the stairs, pausing above the small agitated throng in the hall.
+
+A passionate elation swept over him. He held his long arms upward and
+out.
+
+“How many of the fifty thousand are here?” he asked. His ringing voice
+was answered in an assent that rolled in a solid volume of sound up the
+stairs. Elim Meikeljohn's soul leaped in the supreme kinship that linked
+him, man to man, with all.
+
+V
+
+It was again April, extremely early in the morning and month, and
+thickly cold, when Brevet-Major Elim Meikeljohn, burning with the fever
+of a re-opened old saber wound, strayed away from his command in the
+direction of Richmond. His thoughts revolved with the rapidity of a
+pinwheel, throwing off crackling ideas, illuminated with blinding spurts
+and exploding colors, in every direction. A vague persistent pressure
+sent him toward the city. It was being evacuated; the Union forces,
+he knew, were to enter at dawn; but he had stumbled ahead, careless of
+consequences, oblivious of possible reprisal.
+
+He was, he recognized by the greater blackness ahead, near the outskirts
+of the city--for Richmond was burning. The towering black mass of
+smoke was growing more perceptible in the slowly lightening dawn. Elim
+Meikeljohn could now hear the low sullen uprush of flames, the faint
+crackling of timbers, and a hot aromatic odor met him in faint waves.
+
+His scabbard beat awkwardly about his heels, and he impatiently unhooked
+it and threw it into the gloom of the roadside. The service revolver was
+still in its holster; but he had forgotten its presence and use. In
+the multicolored confusion of his mind but one conscious impression
+remained; and, in its reiteration, he said aloud, over and over, in dull
+tones, “Two, Linden Row.”
+
+The words held no concrete meaning, they constructed no vision, embodied
+no tangible desire; they were merely the mechanical expression of
+an obscure and dominating impulse. He was hardly more sensate in his
+progress than a nail drawn irresistibly by a magnet.
+
+The gray mist dissolved, and his long haggard face grew visible; it had
+not aged in the past four years of struggle--almost from boyhood it had
+been marked with somber longitudinal lines--but it had grown keener,
+more intense, with the expression of a man whose body had starved
+through a great spiritual conflict. His uniform, creased and stained,
+and now silvery with dew, flapped about a gaunt ironlike frame; and from
+under the leather peak of his kepi, even in his fever, his eyes burned
+steady and compelling.
+
+Scattered houses, seemingly as unsubstantial as shadows, gathered about
+him; they grew more frequent, joined shoulder to shoulder, and he was in
+a city street. On the left he caught a glimpse of the river, solid and
+smooth and unshining; a knot of men passed shouting hoarsely, and a wave
+of heat swept over him like a choking cloth. Like the morning, his mind
+partially cleared, people and scenes grew coherent. The former were a
+disheveled and rioting rabble; the conflagration spread in lurid waves.
+
+The great stores of the tobacco warehouses had been set on fire, and the
+spanning flames threatened the entire city. The rich odor of the burning
+tobacco leaves rolled over the streets in drifting showers of ruby
+sparks. The groups on the streets resolved into individuals. Elim saw
+a hulking woman, with her waist torn from grimy shoulders, cursing the
+retreating Confederate troops with uplifted quivering fists; he saw
+soldiers in gray joined to shifty town characters furtively bearing
+away swollen sacks; carriages with plunging frenzied horses, a man with
+white-faced and despairingly calm women. He stopped hurrying in the
+opposite direction and demanded:
+
+“Two, Linden Row?”
+
+The other waved a vague arm toward the right and broke away.
+
+The street mounted sharply and Elim passed an open space teeming with
+hurrying forms, shrill with cries lost in the drumming roar of the
+flames. Every third man was drunk. He passed fights, bestial grimaces,
+heard the fretful crack of revolvers. The great storehouses were now
+below him, and he could see the shuddering inky masses of smoke blotting
+out quarter after quarter. He was on a more important thoroughfare now,
+and inquired again:
+
+“Two, Linden Row?”
+
+This man ejaculated:
+
+“The Yankees are here!” The fact seemed to stupefy him, and he stood
+with hanging hands and mouth.
+
+Elim Meikeljohn repeated his query and was answered by a negro who had
+joined them.
+
+“On ahead, capt'n,” he volunteered; “fourth turn past the capitol and
+first crossing.”
+
+The other regained his speech and began to curse the negro and Elim, but
+the latter moved swiftly on.
+
+Above him, through the shifting tenebrous banks, he saw a classic white
+building on a patch of incredible greenery, infinitely remote; and then
+from the center of the city came a deafening explosion, a great sullen
+sheet of flame, followed by flashes like lightning in the settling
+blackness.
+
+“The powder magazines,” Elim heard repeated from person to person. An
+irregular file of Confederate soldiers galloped past him, and the echo
+of their hoofs had hardly died before a troop of mounted Union cavalry,
+with slanting carbines, rode at their heels. They belonged, Elim
+recognized, to Kautz' command.
+
+He had now reached the fourth turn beyond the withdrawn vision of
+the capitol, and he advanced through a black snowing of soot. Flames,
+fanlike and pallid, now flickered about his feet, streamed in the
+gutters and lapped the curbs. He saw heaps of broken bottles against
+the bricks, and the smell of fine spilled wines and liquors hung in his
+nostrils. His reason again wavered--the tremendous spectacle of
+burning assumed an apocalyptic appearance, as if the city had burst
+spontaneously into flame from the passionate and evil spirits engendered
+and liberated by war.
+
+He stopped at the first crossing and saw before him a row of tall brick
+houses, built solidly and set behind small yards and a low iron fencing.
+They had shallow porticoes with iron grilling, and at this end a
+towering magnolia tree swept its new glossy greenery against the
+third-story windows.
+
+“Linden Row,” he muttered. “Well--Number Two?”
+
+He swung back a creaking gate and went up a flight of bricked steps to
+the door. He had guessed right; above a brass knocker filmed with the
+floating muck of the air he saw the numeral, Two, painted beneath the
+fanlight. The windows on the left were blank, curtained. The house rose
+silent and without a mark of life above the obscene clamor of the city.
+He knocked sharply and waited; then he knocked again. Nothing broke the
+stillness of the façade, the interior. He tried the door, but it was
+solidly barred. Then a second fact, a memory, joined the bare location
+in his brain. It was a name--Rose--Rosemary Roselle. He beat with an
+emaciated fist on the paneling and called, “Roselle! Roselle!”
+
+There was a faint answering stir within; he heard the rattle of a chain;
+the door swung back upon an apparently empty and cavernous cool hall.
+
+VI
+
+A colored woman, in a crisp white turban, with a strained face more gray
+than brown, suddenly advanced holding before her in both hands a heavy
+revolver of an outworn pattern. Elim Meikeljohn could see by her drawn
+features that she was about to pull the trigger, and he said fretfully:
+
+“Don't! The thing will explode. One of us will get hurt.” She closed
+her eyes, Elim threw up his arm, and an amazingly loud report crashed
+through the entry. He stood swaying weakly, with hanging palms, while
+the woman dropped the revolver with a gasp. Elim Meikeljohn began to cry
+with short dry sobs.... It was incredible that any one should discharge
+a big revolver directly at his head. He sank limply against a chest at
+the wall.
+
+“Oh, Indy!” a shaken voice exclaimed. “Do you think he's dying?” The
+colored woman went reluctantly forward and peered at Elim. She touched
+him on a shoulder.
+
+“'Deed, Miss Rosemary,” she replied, relieved and angry, “that shot
+didn't touch a hair. He's just crying like a big old nothing.” She
+grasped him more firmly, gave him a shake. “Dressed like a soldier,” she
+proceeded scornfully, “and scaring us out of our wits. What did you want
+to come here for anyhow calling out names?”
+
+Elim's head rolled forward and back. The hall seemed full of flaming
+arrows, and he collapsed slowly on the polished floor. He was moved; he
+was half-conscious of his heels dragging upstairs, of frequent pauses,
+voices expostulating and directing thinly. Finally he sank into a
+sublimated peace in, apparently, a floating white cloud.
+
+He awoke refreshed, mentally clear, but absurdly weak--he was lying in
+the middle of a four-posted bed, a bed with posts so massive and tall
+that they resembled smooth towering trees. Beyond them he could see
+a marble mantel; a grate filled with softly smoldering coals, and a
+gleaming brass hod; a highboy with a dark lustrous surface; oval gold
+frames; and muslin curtains in an open window, stirring in an air that
+moved the fluted valance at the top of the bed. It was late afternoon,
+the light was fading, the interior wavering in a clear shadow filled
+with the faint fat odor of the soft coal.
+
+The immaculate bed linen bore an elusive cool scent, into which he
+relapsed with profound delight. The personality of the room, somber and
+still, flowed about him with a magical release from the inferno of
+the past years, the last hours. He heard a movement at a door, and the
+colored woman in the white turban moved to the side of the bed.
+
+“I told her,” she said in an aggrieved voice, “there wasn't nothing at
+all wrong with you. I reckon now you're all ready to fight again or eat.
+Why did you stir things all up in Richmond and kill good folks?”
+
+“To set you free!” Elim Meikeljohn replied.
+
+She gazed at him thoughtfully.
+
+“Capt'n,” she asked finally, “are you free?”
+
+“Why, certainly----” he began, and then stopped abruptly, lost in the
+memory of the dour past. He recalled his father, with a passion for
+learning, imprisoned in the narrow poverty of his circumstances and
+surroundings; he remembered Hester, with her wishful gaze in the
+confines of her invalid chair; his own laborious lonely days. Freedom,
+a high and difficult term, he saw concerned regions of the spirit not
+liberated--solved--by a simple declaration on the body. The war had been
+but the initial, most facile step. The woman had silenced his sounding
+assertion, humiliated him, by a word. He gazed at her with a new, less
+confident interest. The mental effort brought a momentary recurrence of
+fever; he flushed and muttered: “Freedom ... spirit.”
+
+“You're not as wholesome as you appeared,” the woman judged. “You can't
+have nothing beside a glass of milk.” She crossed the room and, stirring
+the fire, put on fresh coal that ignited with an oily crackle. Again at
+the door she paused. “Don't you try to move about,” she directed; “you
+stay right in this room. Mr. Roselle, he's downstairs, and Mr. McCall,
+and--” her voice took on a faint insistent note of warning. He paid
+little heed to her; he was lost in a wave of weariness.
+
+The following morning, stronger, he rose and tentatively trying the
+door found it locked. The colored woman appeared soon after with a
+tray which, when he had performed a meager toilet, he attacked with a
+pleasant zest.
+
+“The city's just burning right up,” she informed him, standing in the
+middle of the floor; “the boats on the river caught fire and their
+camions banged into Canal Street.” She had a pale even color, a straight
+delicate nose and sensitive lips.
+
+“Are the Union troops in charge?” he asked.
+
+“Yes, sir. They got some of the fire out, I heard tell. But that's not
+the worst now--a body can't set her foot in the street, it's so full of
+drunken roaring trash, black and white. It's good Mr. Roselle and Mr.
+McCall and Mr. John are here,” she declared again; “they could just
+finish off anybody that offered to turn a bad hand.”
+
+This, Elim felt, was incongruous with his reception yesterday.
+
+Still he made no inquiry. The breakfast finished, he relapsed once more
+on his pillows and heard the key stealthily turn in the door from the
+outside.
+
+He told himself, without conviction, that he must rise and join his
+command. The war, he knew, was over; the courage that had sustained him
+during the struggle died. The simple question of the colored woman had
+largely slain it. His own personality, the vision of his forthcoming
+life and necessity, rose to the surface of his consciousness. Elim
+realized what had drawn, him to his present situation--it had, of
+course, been the memory of Rosemary Roselle. The days when he--an
+assistant to a professor of philosophy and letters--had read and marked
+her essays seemed to lie in another existence, infinitely remote. How
+would he excuse his presence, the calling of her name before the house?
+This was an inopportune--a fatal--moment for a man in the blue of the
+North to make his bow to a Richmond girl, in the midst of her wasted and
+burning place of home. He decided reluctantly that it would be best to
+say nothing of his connection with her academic labors, but to depart
+as soon as possible and without explanation of his first summons....
+Rosemary Roselle--the name had clung persistently to his memory. It was
+probable that he would see her--once. That alone was extraordinary. He
+marveled at the grim humor of circumstance that had granted him such a
+wildly improbable wish, and at the same time made it humanly impossible
+for him to benefit from it.
+
+VII
+
+The leisurely progress of his thoughts was interrupted by hasty feet
+without; the bolt was shot back and his door flung open. It was the
+colored woman--the Indy of the essay--quivering with anger and fear.
+
+“Capt'n,” she exclaimed, gasping with her rapid accent, “you come right
+down to the dining room, and bring that big pistol of yours. There's
+two, two----” Words failed her. “Anyhow you shoot them! It's some
+of that liberty you brought along, I reckon. You come down to Miss
+Rosemary!”
+
+She stood tense and ashen, and Elim rose on one elbow.
+
+“Some of our liberty?” he queried. “Did Miss Roselle send for me?”
+
+“No, sir, she didn't. Miss Rosemary she wouldn't send for you, not if
+you were the last man alive. I'm telling you to come down to the dining
+room.... We've tended you and--”
+
+“Well,” he demanded impatiently, “what do you want; whom shall I shoot?”
+
+“You'll see, quick enough. And I can't stand here talking either; I've
+got to go back. You get yourself right along down!”
+
+With painful slowness Elim made his preparations to descend; his fingers
+could hardly buckle the stiff strap of his revolver sling, but finally
+he made his way downstairs through a deep narrow hall. He turned from a
+blank wall to a darkened reception room, with polished mahogany, somber
+books and engravings on the walls, and a rosy blur of fire in the
+hearth. A more formal chamber lay at his right, empty, but through an
+opposite door he caught the faint clatter of a spoon.
+
+Rosemary Roselle was seated, rigid and white, at the end of a table that
+bore a scattered array of dishes. There were shadows beneath her eyes,
+and her hands, on the table, were clenched. On her left a man in
+an unmarked blue uniform sat, sagging heavily forward in his chair,
+breathing stertorously, with a dark flush over a pouched and flaccid
+countenance. Opposite him, sitting formally upright, was a negro in a
+carefully brushed gray suit, with a crimson satin necktie surcharged by
+vivid green lightning. His bony face, the deep pits of his temples, were
+the dry spongy black of charcoal, and behind steel-rimmed glasses his
+eyes rolled like yellow agates. He glanced about, furtive and startled,
+when Elim Meikeljohn entered, but he was immediately reassured by Elim's
+disordered uniform. He made a solemn obeisance.
+
+“Colonel,” he said, “will you make one of a little informal repast? We
+are, you see, at the lady's table.”
+
+Overcome by a sharp weakness, Elim slipped into the chair at his side
+and faced Rosemary Roselle. The latter gave no sign of his presence.
+She sat frozen into a species of statuesque rage. “Like you,” the negro
+continued pompously, “we invited ourselves. All things are free and easy
+for all. The glorious principle of equality instituted lately has swept
+away--swept away the inviderous distinctions of class and color. The
+millenium has come!” He made a grandiloquent gesture with a sooty hand.
+
+“'Ray!” the sodden individual opposite unexpectedly cried.
+
+“We came in,” the other continued, “to uphold our rights as the
+exponents of--of----”
+
+“You sneaked in the kitchen,” the woman in the doorway interrupted; “and
+I found you rummaging in the press.”
+
+“Silence!” the orator commanded. “Are you unaware of the dignity now
+resting on your kinks--hair, hair.” He rose, facing Elim Meikeljohn.
+“Colonel, gentleman, in a conglomeration where we are all glorious
+cohevals of--of--”
+
+“Shut up!” said the apostrophized colonel, sudden and fretful. “Get
+out!”
+
+The orator paused, disconcerted, in the midflow of his figures; and
+unaccustomed arrogance struggled with habitual servility. “Gentleman,”
+ he repeated, “in a corposity of souls high above all narrow
+malignations--”
+
+Elim Meikeljohn took his revolver from its holster and laid it before
+him on the table. The weapon produced an electrical effect on the figure
+nodding in a drunken stupor. He rose abruptly and uncertain.
+
+“I'm going,” he asserted; “come on, Spout. You can be free and equal
+better somewheres else.”
+
+The negro hesitated; his hand, Elim saw, moved slightly toward a knife
+lying by his plate. Elim's fingers closed about the handle of his
+revolver; he gazed with a steady cold glitter, a thin mouth, at the
+black masklike countenance above the hectic tie and neat gray suit.
+
+The latter backed slowly, instinctively, toward the rear door. His
+companion had already faded from view. The negro proclaimed:
+
+“I go momentiously. There are others of us banded to obtain
+equality irrespectable of color; we shall be back and things will
+go different.... They have gone different in other prideful
+domestications.”
+
+Elim Meikeljohn raised the muzzle lying on the cloth, and the negro
+disappeared. Rosemary Roselle did not move; her level gaze saw,
+apparently, nothing of her surroundings; her hands were still clenched
+on the board. She was young, certainly not twenty, but her oval
+countenance was capable of a mature severity not to be ignored. He
+saw that she had wide brown eyes the color of a fall willow leaf, a
+high-bridged nose and a mouth--at present--a marvel of contempt. Her
+slight figure was in a black dress; she was without rings or ornamental
+gold.
+
+“That talking trash gave me a cold misery,” the colored woman
+admitted. She glanced at the girl and moved a bowl of salad nearer Elim
+Meikeljohn. “Miss Rosemary,” she begged, “take something, my heart.”
+
+Rosemary Roselle answered with a slow shudder; she slipped forward,
+with her face buried in her arms on the table. Elim regarded her with
+profound mingled emotions. In the fantastic past, when he had created
+her from the studied essays, he had thought of her--censoriously--as
+gay. Perhaps she danced! He wondered momentarily where the men were
+Indy had spoken of as present; then he realized that they had been but
+a precautionary figment of Indy's imagination; the girl, except for the
+woman with the tender brown hand caressing her shoulder, was alone in
+the house.
+
+He sat with chin on breast gazing with serious speculation at the
+crumpled figure opposite him. Indy, corroborating his surmise, said to
+the girl:
+
+“I can't make out at all why your papa don't come back. He said
+yesterday when he left he wouldn't be hardly an hour.”
+
+“Something dreadful has happened,” Rosemary Roselle insisted, raising a
+hopeless face. “Indy, do you suppose he's dead like McCall and--and--”
+
+“Mr. Roselle he ain't dead,” the woman responded stoutly; “he's just had
+to keep low trash from stealing all his tobacco.”
+
+“He could easily be found,” Elim put in; “I could have an orderly
+detailed, word brought you in no time.” The girl paid not the slightest
+heed to his proposal. From the street came a hoarse drunken shouting, a
+small inflamed rabble streamed by. It wouldn't be safe to leave Rosemary
+Roselle alone here with Indy. He recalled the threat of the black
+pomposity he had driven from the house--it was possible that there were
+others, banded, and that they would return. It was clear to him that he
+must stay until its head reappeared, order had been reestablished--or,
+if he went out, take the girl with him.
+
+“You let the capt'n do what he says,” the woman urged. Rosemary
+Roselle's eyes turned toward Elim; it was, seemingly, the first time she
+had become aware of his presence. She said in a voice delicately colored
+by hate:
+
+“Thank you, I couldn't think of taking the--the orderly from his
+conquests.”
+
+“Then I'll find your father myself,” Elim replied. “You will come with
+me, of course; show me where to go. It would be a good thing to start at
+once. I--we--might be of some assistance to him with his tobacco.”
+
+Indy declared with an expression of instant determination:
+
+“We'll go right along with you.” She silenced Rosemary's instinctive
+protest. “I'll get your hat and shawl,” she told the girl.
+
+And, before the latter could object, the colored woman hurried from the
+room.
+
+Silence enveloped the two at the table. Elim replaced his revolver in
+its belt. He had never before studied a girl like Rosemary Roselle; fine
+white frills fell about her elbows from under the black short sleeves.
+Her skin was incredibly smooth and white. It was evident that her hands
+had never done manual labor; their pointed little beauty fascinated him.
+He thought of the toil-hardened hands of the women of his home. This
+girl represented all that he had been taught to abjure, all that--by
+inheritance--he had in the abstract condemned. She represented
+the vanities; she was vanity itself; and now he was recklessly,
+contumaciously, glad of it. Her sheer loveliness of being intoxicated
+him; suddenly it seemed as absolutely necessary to life as the virtues
+of moral rectitude and homely labor. Personally, he discovered, he
+preferred such beauty to the latter adamantine qualities. He had a fleet
+moment of amazed self-consciousness: Elim Meikeljohn--his father an
+elder in the house of God--astray in the paths of condemned worldly
+frivolities! Then he recalled a little bush of vivid red roses his
+mother carefully protected and cultivated; he saw their bright fragrant
+patch on the rocky gray expanse of the utilitarian acres; and suddenly
+a light of new understanding enveloped his mother's gaunt drearily-clad
+figure. He employed in this connection the surprising word “starved.”
+ ... Rosemary Roselle was a flower.
+
+Indy returned with a small hat of honey-colored straw and a soft
+white-silk mantilla. The former she drew upon the girl's head and
+wrapped the shawl about the slim shoulders.
+
+“Now,” she pronounced decisively, “we're going to find your papa.” She
+led Rosemary Roselle toward the outer door. Elim found his cap in the
+hall and followed them down the bricked steps to the street. It was at
+present deserted, quiet; and they turned to the left, making their way
+toward the river and warehouses.
+
+The fires had largely subsided; below them rose blackened bare walls of
+brick, sullen twisting flags of smoke; an air of sooty desolation had
+settled over the city. Houses were tightly shuttered; some with broken
+doors had a trail of hastily discarded loot on the porticoes; still
+others were smoldering shells.
+
+A bugle call rose clear and triumphant from the capital; at one place
+they passed Union soldiers, extinguishing flames.
+
+They descended the flagged street over which Elim had come, turned into
+another called--he saw--Cary, and finally halted before a long somber
+façade. Here, too, the fire had raged; the charred timbers of the fallen
+roof projected desolately into air.
+
+A small group at a main entrance faced them as they approached; a
+coatless man with haggard features, his clothes saturated with water,
+advanced quickly.
+
+“Miss Rosemary!” he ejaculated in palpable dismay. He drew Elim
+Meikeljohn aside. “Take her away,” he directed; “her father ... killed,
+trying to save his papers.”
+
+“Where?” Elim demanded. “Their house is empty. She can't stay in
+Richmond alone.”
+
+“I'd forgotten that!” the other admitted. “McCall and John both gone,
+mother dead, and now--by heaven!” he exclaimed, low and distressed, “she
+has just no one. I'm without a place. Her friends have left. There's a
+distant connection at Bramant's Wharf, but that's almost at the mouth of
+the James.”
+
+Rosemary Roselle came up to them.
+
+“Mr. Jim Haxall,” she asked, direct and white, “is father dead?”
+
+He studied her for a moment and then answered:
+
+“Yes, Miss Rosemary.”
+
+She swayed. Indy, at her side, enveloped her in a sustaining arm.
+
+“Indy,” the girl said, her face on the woman's breast, “he, too!”
+
+“I'm sending a few bales of leaf down the river,” Haxall continued to
+Elim; “the sloop'll pass Bramant's Wharf; but the crew will be just
+anybody. Miss Rosemary couldn't go with only her nigger--”
+
+Elim Meikeljohn spoke mechanically:
+
+“I'll be responsible for her.” The war was over; he had been ordered
+from the column when his wound had broken afresh, and in a maze of fever
+he had been irresistibly impelled toward Linden Row. “I'll take her to
+Bramant's Wharf.”
+
+Haxall regarded suspiciously the disordered blue uniform; then his gaze
+shifted to Elim's somber lined countenance.
+
+“Miss Rosemary's rubies and gold--” he said finally. “But I believe
+you're honest, I believe you're a good man.”
+
+VIII
+
+James Haxall explained this to Rosemary. Elim, standing aside, could see
+that the girl neither assented nor raised objection. She seemed utterly
+listless; a fleet emotion at the knowledge of her father's death had, in
+that public place, been immediately repressed. The sloop, Elim learned,
+was ready to start at once. The afternoon was declining; to reach
+Bramant's Wharf would take them through the night and into the meridian
+of tomorrow. They had made no preparations for the trip, there was
+neither bedding nor food; but Elim and Haxall agreed that it was best
+for Rosemary Roselle to leave the city at the price of any slight
+momentary discomfort.
+
+Elim looked about for a place where he might purchase food. A near-by
+eating house had been completely wrecked, its floor a debris of broken
+crockery. Beyond, a baker's shop had been deserted, its window shattered
+but the interior intact. The shelves, however, had been swept bare of
+loaves. Elim searched behind the counters--nothing remained. But in
+walking out his foot struck against a round object, wrapped in paper,
+which on investigation proved to be a fruit cake of satisfactory
+solidity and size. With this beneath his arm he returned to Rosemary
+Roselle, and they followed Haxall to the wharf where the sloop lay.
+
+The tiller was in charge of an old man with peering pale-blue eyes and
+tremulous siccated hands. Yet he had an astonishingly potent voice, and
+issued orders, in tones like the grating of metal edges, to a loutish
+youth in a ragged shirt and bare legs. The cabin, partly covered, was
+filled with bagged bales; a small space had been left for the steersman,
+and forward the deck was littered with untidy ropes and swab, windlass
+bar and other odds.
+
+Elim Meikeljohn moved forward to assist Rosemary on to the sloop,
+but she evaded his hand and jumped lightly down upon the deck, Indy,
+grumbling and certain of catastrophe, was safely got aboard, and Elim
+helped the youth to push the craft's bow out into the stream. The grimy
+mainsail rose slowly, the jib was set, and they deliberately gathered
+way, slipping silently between the timbered banks, emerging from the
+thin pungent influence of the smoking ruins.
+
+Behind them the sun transfused the veiled city into a coppery blur that
+gradually sank into a tender-blue dusk. Indy had arranged a place with
+the most obtainable comfort for Rosemary Roselle; she sat with her back
+against the mast, gazing toward the bank, stealing backward, at the
+darkening trees moving in solemn procession.
+
+After the convulsed and burning city, the uproar of guns and clash of
+conflict, the quiet progress of the sloop was incredibly peaceful and
+withdrawn. Elim felt as if they had been detached from the familiar
+material existence and had been set afloat in a stream of silken
+shadows. The wind was behind them, the boom had been let far but, the
+old steersman drowsed at his post, and the youth had fallen instantly
+asleep in a strange cramped attitude.
+
+Elim was standing at the stern--he had conceived it his duty to stay as
+far away from Rosemary Roselle as her wish plainly indicated; but,
+in this irrelated phase of living, he gradually lost his sense of
+responsibility and restrained conduct. He wanted extravagantly to be
+near Rosemary, to be where he could see her clearly. Perhaps, but this
+was unlikely, she would speak to him. His desire gradually flooded him;
+it induced a species of careless heroism, and he made his way resolutely
+forward and sat on a heap of rope at a point where he could study her
+with moderate propriety and success. She glanced at him momentarily when
+he took his place--he saw that her under lip was capable of an extremely
+human and annoying expression--and returned to her veiled scrutiny of
+the sliding banks.
+
+An unfamiliar emotion stirred at Elim's heart; and in his painstaking
+introspective manner he exposed it. He found a happiness that, at the
+same time, was a pain; he found an actual catch in his throat that was
+a nebulous desire; he found an utter loneliness together with the
+conviction that this earth was a place of glorious possibilities of
+affinity. Principally he was conscious of an urging of his entire being
+toward the slight figure in black, staring with wide bereft eyes into
+the gathering evening. On the other side of the mast, Indy was sleeping
+with her head upon her breast. The feeling in Elim steadily increased
+in poignancy--faint stars appearing above the indefinite foliage pierced
+him with their beauty, the ashen-blue sky vibrated in a singing chord,
+the river divided in whispering confidences on the bow of the sloop.
+
+Elim Meikeljohn debated the wisdom of a remark; his courage grew
+immeasurably reckless.
+
+“The wind and river are shoving us along together.” Pronounced, the
+sentence seemed appallingly compromising; he had meant that the wind and
+river together, not--
+
+She made no reply; one hand, he saw, stirred slightly.
+
+Since he had not been blasted into nothingness, he continued:
+
+“I'm glad the war's over. Why,” he exclaimed in genuine surprise, “you
+can hear the birds again.” A sleepy twitter had floated out over the
+stream. Still no response. He should not, certainly, have mentioned
+the war. He wondered desperately what a fine and delicate being like
+Rosemary Roselle talked about? It would be wise to avoid serious and
+immediate considerations for commonplaces.
+
+“Ellik McCosh,” he said, “a girl in our village who went to Boston,
+learned to dance, and when she came back she taught two or three. Her
+communion medal was removed from her,” he added with complete veracity.
+“Perhaps,” he went on conversationally, “you don't have communion medals
+in Richmond--it's a little lead piece you have when you are in good
+standing at the Lord's table. Mine was taken away for three months for
+whistling by the church door. A long while ago,” he ended in a different
+voice. He thought of the fruit cake, and breaking off a piece offered it
+to the silent girl. “It's like your own,” he told her, placing it on a
+piece of paper at her side; “it's from Richmond and wasn't even paid for
+with strange silver.”
+
+At this last a sudden uneasiness possessed him, and he hurriedly
+searched his pockets. He had exactly fifty cents. Until the present he
+had totally overlooked the depleted state of his fortune. Elim had
+some arrears of pay, but now he seriously doubted whether they were
+collectible. Nothing else. He had emerged from the war brevetted major
+but as penniless as the morning of his enlistment. He doubted whether,
+in the hurry of departure, Rosemary Roselle had remembered to bring any
+money.
+
+Still, she would be cared for, supplied with every necessity, at
+Bramant's Wharf. There he would leave her ... his breathing stopped,
+for, incredibly, he saw that her hand was suspended over the piece of
+cake. She took it up and ate it slowly, absently. This, he felt,
+had created a bond between them; but it was a conviction in which,
+apparently, she had no share. She might have thanked him but she didn't.
+
+An underhanded and indefensible expedient occurred to him, and he sat
+for a perceptible number of minutes concentrating his memory upon a dim
+and special object. Finally he raised his head.
+
+“Indy,” he quoted, “a large light mulatto, hasn't much sense but a great
+deal of sensibility. That,” he added of himself, “is evidently very
+well observed.” He saw that Rosemary turned her head with an impatient
+curiosity. “She is very unfortunate,” he continued uncertainly; “she
+lost a present of money and couldn't work till it was given back.”
+
+“But how,” demanded Rosemary Roselle, “did you know that?” Curiosity had
+betrayed her.
+
+Elim Meikeljohn concealed a grin with difficulty. It was evident that
+she profoundly regretted the lapse, yet she would not permit herself to
+retreat from her position. She maintained a high intolerant aspect of
+query.
+
+“Have you forgotten,” he went on, “how the dread day rolled around?” He
+paused wickedly. “The slough of despond?” he added.
+
+“What silly stuff!” Rosemary pronounced.
+
+“It was,” he agreed, “mostly. But the paper about Indy was a superior
+production. B plus, I think.”
+
+A slow comprehension dawned on her face, blurred by the night.
+
+“So that's where they went,” she observed; “you marked them.” He would
+have sworn that a smile hovered for the fraction of a moment on her pale
+lips. She drew up her shoulders slightly and turned away.
+
+His best, his only hope had flickered for a minute and died away. Her
+silence was like impregnable armor. A puff of wind filled the sails,
+there was a straining of cordage, an augmented bubbling at the sloop's
+bow, and then the stir subsided. He passed into a darkness of old
+distresses, forebodings, grim recollections from his boyhood, inherited
+bleak memories. Rosemary Roselle's upright figure gradually sank. He
+realized that she was asleep on her arm. Elim bent forward shamelessly
+and studied her worn countenance. There was a trace of tears on her
+cheek. She was as delicate, as helpless as a flower sleeping on its
+stalk.
+
+An impulse to touch her hair was so compelling that he started back,
+shaken; a new discordant tumult rose within him, out of which emerged
+an aching hunger for Rosemary Roselle; he wanted her with a passion cold
+and numbing like ether. He wanted her without reason, and in the desire
+lost his deep caution, his rectitude of conscience. He was torn far
+beyond the emotional possibilities of weak men. The fact that, penniless
+and without a home, he had nothing to offer was lost in the beat and
+surge of his feelings. He went with the smashing completeness of a heavy
+body, broken loose in an elemental turmoil. He wanted her; her fragrant
+spirit, the essence that was herself, Rosemary Roselle. He couldn't
+take it; such consummations, he realized, were beyond will and act, they
+responded from planes forever above human desire--there was not even
+a rift of hope. The banks had been long lost in the night; the faint
+disembodied cry of an owl breathed across the invisible river.
+
+IX
+
+She woke with a little confused cry, and sat gazing distractedly into
+the dark, her hands pressed to her cheeks.
+
+“Don't you remember,” Elim Meikeljohn spoke, “Haxall and the sloop; your
+relatives at Bramant's Wharf?”
+
+She returned to a full consciousness of her surroundings.
+
+“I was dreaming so differently,” she told him. It seemed to Elim that
+the antagonism had departed from her voice; he even had a feeling that
+she was glad of his presence. Indy, prostrate on the deck with her chin
+elevated to the stars, had not moved.
+
+The darkness increased, broken only by the colored glimmer of the port
+and starboard lights and a wan blur about the old man bent over the
+tiller. Once he woke the youth and sent him forward with a sounding
+pole, once the sloop scraped heavily over a mud bank, but that was all;
+their imperceptible progress was smooth, unmarked.
+
+Elim, recalling Joshua, wished that the sloop and night were anchored,
+stationary. Already he smelled the dawn in a newly stirring, cold air.
+The darkness thickened. Rosemary Roselle said:
+
+“I'm dreadfully hungry.”
+
+He immediately produced the fruit cake.
+
+“It's really quite satisfactory,” she continued, eating; “It's like the
+rest of this--unreal.... What is your name?” she demanded unexpectedly.
+
+“Elim Meikeljohn.”
+
+“That's a very Northern sort of name.”
+
+“It would be hard to come by one more so,” he agreed. “It's from the
+highlands of Scotland.”
+
+“Then if you don't mind, I'll think of you as Scotch right now.”
+
+He conveyed to her the fact that he didn't.
+
+“Look!” she exclaimed. “There's the morning!”
+
+A thin gray streak widened across the east. Almost immediately the night
+dissolved. They were sweeping down the middle of a river that surprised
+Elim with its width and majesty. The withdrawn banks bore clustered
+trees, undulating green reached inland, the shaded facades of houses sat
+back on lawns that dipped to the stream.
+
+Rosemary Roselle's face was pale with fatigue; her eyes appeared
+preternaturally large; and this, for Elim, made her charm infinitely
+more appealing. She smoothed her dress, touched her hair with light
+fingers. The intimacy of it all thrilled him. A feeling of happy
+irresponsibility deepened. He lost sight of the probable unhappiness of
+tomorrow, the catastrophe that was yesterday; Elim was radiantly content
+with the present.
+
+“You look Northern too,” she went on; “you are so much more solemn than
+the Virginia men--I mean your face is.”
+
+“I suppose I've had a solemn sort of existence,” he agreed. “Life's
+an awful serious thing where I was born. The days are not long enough,
+life's too short, to get your work done. It's a stony pasture,” he
+admitted. He described the Meikeljohn farm land, sloping steeply
+to swift rocky streams, the bare existence of the sheep, the bitter
+winters. He touched briefly on Hester and his marriage.
+
+“It's no wonder,” she pronounced, “that you have shadows in your eyes.
+You can't imagine,” she continued, “how wonderful everything was in
+Richmond, before--I simply can't talk about it now. I suppose we are
+ruined, but there isn't a man or woman who wouldn't do the same thing
+all over again. I'm almost glad that father isn't--isn't here; misery
+of any kind made him so wretched ... perfect memories.” She closed her
+eyes.
+
+Her under lip, he saw, projected slightly, her chin was fine but
+stubborn. These details renewed his delight; they lent a warm humanity
+to her charm.
+
+“Any one would know,” she said, regarding him, “that you are absolutely
+trustworthy. It's a nice quality now, but I don't think I would have
+noticed it even a month ago. You can see that I have grown frightfully
+old in the littlest while. Yes, you are comfortable to be with, and I
+suspect that counts for a great deal. It's quite sad, too, to grow old.
+Oh, look, we've changed! Where do you suppose he is going? This can't
+nearly be Bramant's.”
+
+The mainsail had been hauled in, and the course of the sloop changed,
+quartering in toward the shore. The youth, moving forward, stopped to
+enlighten them. He jerked a thumb in the direction of the old man.
+
+“He's got kin here at Jerico,” he explained; “and we're setting in to
+see them. We won't stop long.”
+
+The mainsail came smoothly down, the jib fluttered, and the sloop slid
+in beside a sturdy old wharf, projecting from a deep fringe of willows.
+No sign of life or habitation was visible.
+
+The youth made fast a hawser, the old man mounted painfully to the dock,
+and Indy stirred and rose.
+
+“I must have just winked asleep,” she declared in consternation.
+
+Rosemary Roselle lightly left the boat, and Elim followed. “If we
+explored,” he proposed, “perhaps we could get you a cup of coffee.”
+ She elected, however, to stay by the river, and Elim went inward alone.
+Beyond the willows was an empty marshland. The old man had disappeared,
+with no trace of his objective kin. A road, deep in yellow mire, mounted
+a rise beyond and vanished a hundred yards distant. Elim, unwilling to
+get too far away from the sloop, had turned and moved toward the wharf,
+when he was halted by the sound of horses' hoofs.
+
+He saw approaching him over the road a light open carriage with a
+fringed canopy and a pair of horses driven by a negro in a long white
+dust coat. In the body of the carriage a diminutive bonneted head
+was barely visible above an enormous circumference of hoops. Elim saw
+bobbing gray curls, peering anxious eyes, and a fluttering hand in a
+black silk-thread mit.
+
+“Gossard,” a feminine voice cried shrilly to the driver, at the sight of
+Elim on the roadside, “here's a Yankee army; lick up those horses!”
+
+The negro swung a vicious whip, the horses started sharply forward,
+but the carriage wheels, sinking in a deep slough, remained fixed; the
+harness creaked but held; the equipage remained stationary. The negro
+dismounted sulkily, and Elim crossed the road and put his shoulder to a
+wheel. Together with the driver, he lifted the carriage on to a firmer
+surface. The old lady was seated with tightly shut eyes.
+
+“This here man ain't going to hurt you,” the driver exclaimed
+impatiently. “This exdus is all nonsense anyways,” he grumbled. “I got a
+mind to stop--I'm free.”
+
+She directed upon him a beady black gaze.
+
+“You get right into this carriage,” she commanded; “you'd be free to
+starve. You are a fool!” The man reluctantly obeyed her. “I thank you
+for your clemency,” she said to Elim. She fumbled among her flounces
+and hoops and produced an object carefully wrapped and tied. “Here,”
+ she proclaimed; “I can still pay for a service. Gossard--” the carriage
+moved forward, was lost in the dip in the road. Elim opened the package
+in his hand and regarded, with something like consternation, a bottle of
+champagne.
+
+Beyond the wharf the great yellow flood of the river gleamed in the sun;
+choirs of robins whistled in trees faintly green. Rosemary Roselle was
+seated with her feet hanging over the water.
+
+“Champagne for breakfast,” she observed, shaking her head; “only the
+most habitual sports manage that.” He recounted the episode of the
+“Yankee army,” delighted by her less formal tone, then the old man
+returned as enigmatically as he had disappeared. The ropes were cast
+off, the sloop swung out into the current, and their smooth progress was
+resumed.
+
+A few more hours and they would be at Bramant's Wharf. There, Elim knew,
+he would be expected to leave Rosemary. There would be a perfunctory
+gratitude from her relatives, perhaps a warmer appreciation from
+herself--a moment--a momentary pressure of her hand--and then--where? He
+would never again come in contact with so exquisite a girl; they were,
+he realized, customarily held in a circle where men like himself,
+outsiders, rarely penetrated; once more with her family and he would be
+forgotten. Anyhow, he had nothing.
+
+But in spite of these heavy reflections his irresponsible happiness
+increased. In this segment of existence no qualifications from the shore
+were valid. Time, himself, at the tiller, seemed drifting, unconcerned.
+Rosemary Roselle regarded Elim with a franker interest. She took off
+a small slipper and emptied some sand from the shore; the simple act
+seemed to him burdened with gracious warmth. Now she was infinitely
+easier than any girl he had known before. Those about his home met the
+younger masculine world either with a blunt sarcasm or with an uneasy
+voiceless propriety. Rosemary, propped on an elbow, was as unconcerned
+as a boy. This made her infinitely more difficult of approach. Her
+slight beautiful body, not hidden by clothes--as decency demanded in
+the more primitive state--was delightfully marked, suggested. Here was
+beauty admitted, lauded, even studied, in place of the fierce masking
+and denouncement of his father and the fellow elders.
+
+He remembered, from collegiate hours, the passion of the Greeks for
+sheer earthly strength and loveliness--Helen and Menelaus, Sappho on
+the green promontories of Lesbos. At the time of his reading he had
+maintained a wry brow ... now Elim Meikeljohn could comprehend the siege
+of Troy.
+
+He said aloud, without thinking and instantly aghast at his words:
+
+“You are like a bodied song.” He was horrified; then his newer spirit
+utterly possessed him, he didn't care; he nodded his long solemn head.
+
+Rosemary Roselle turned toward him with a cool stare that was lost in
+irresistible ringing peals of laughter.
+
+“Oh!” she gasped; “what a face for a compliment. It was just like
+pouring sirup out of a vinegar cruet.”
+
+He became annoyed and cleared his throat in an elder-like manner, but
+her amusement strung out in silvery chuckles.
+
+“It's the first I've said of the kind,” he admitted stiffly; “I've no
+doubt it came awkward.”
+
+She grew more serious, studied him with thoughtful eyes. “Do you know,”
+ she said slowly, “I believe you. Compliments in Virginia are like
+cherries, the trees are full of them; they're nice but worth--so much.”
+ She measured an infinitesimal degree with a rosy nail against a finger.
+“But I can see that yours are different. They almost hurt you, don't
+they?”
+
+He made no reply, struggling weakly against what, he perceived, was to
+follow.
+
+“You're like a song that to hear would draw a man about the world,” said
+Elim Meikeljohn, pagan. “He would leave his sheep and byre, he'd drop
+his duty and desert his old, and follow. I'm lost,” he decided, in
+a last perishing flicker of early teaching; and then he smiled
+inexplicably at the wrath to come.
+
+Rosemary Roselle grew more serious.
+
+“But that's not a compliment at all,” she discovered; “it's more, and it
+makes me uncomfortable. Please stop!”
+
+“About the world,” echoed Elim, “and everything else forgotten.”
+
+“Please,” she repeated, holding up a prohibitory palm.
+
+“Rose petals,” he said, regarding it. His madness increased. She
+withdrew her hand and gazed at him with a small frown. She was sitting
+upright, propped on her arms. Her mouth, with its slightly full
+under lip, was elevated, and an outrageous desire possessed him. His
+countenance slowly turned hotly red, and slowly a faint tide of color
+stained Rosemary Roselle's cheeks. She looked away; Elim looked away.
+He proceeded aft and learned that Bramant's Wharf lay only a few miles
+ahead.
+
+The old man cursed the wind in his stringent tones. Elim hadn't noticed
+anything reprehensible in the wind. It appeared that for a
+considerable time there hadn't been any. A capful was stirring now, and
+humanity--ever discontented--silently cursed that.
+
+“We're nearly there,” he said, returning to Rosemary Roselle.
+
+He was unable to gather any intelligence from her expression.
+
+She rose, and stood with a hand on Indy's shoulder, murmuring
+affectionately in the colored woman's ear. The sloop once more headed
+at a long angle for the shore. Bramant's Wharf grew visible, projecting
+solidly from a verdant bank. They floated silently up to the dock, and
+the youth held the sloop steady while Rosemary Roselle and Indy mounted
+from its deck. Elim followed, but suddenly he stopped, and his hand
+went into his pocket. A half dollar fell ringing into the boat. Elim
+indicated the youth; he was now penniless.
+
+X
+
+“The house,” Rosemary explained, “is almost a mile in. There is a
+carriage at the wharf when they expect you. And usually there is some
+one about.”
+
+Elim, carrying the cake and bottle, followed over a grassy road between
+tangles of blackberry bushes. On either hand neglected fields held
+a sparse tangle of last year's weeds; beyond, trees closed in the
+perspective. The sun had passed the zenith, and the shadows of walnut
+trees fell across the road. Elim's face was grim, a dark tide rose about
+him, enveloping his heart, bothering his vision. He wanted to address
+something final to the slim girl in black before him, something now,
+before she was forever lost in the gabble of her relatives; but he could
+think of nothing appropriate, expressive of the tumult within him. His
+misery deepened with every step, grew into a bitterness of rebellion
+that almost forced an incoherent reckless speech. Rosemary Roselle
+didn't turn, she didn't linger, there were a great many things that she
+might say. The colored woman was positively hurrying forward. A great
+loneliness swept over him. He had not, he thought drearily, been made
+for joy.
+
+“It's queer there's no one about,” Rosemary Roselle observed. They
+reached the imposing pillars of an entrance--the wooden gate was
+chained, and they were obliged to turn aside and search for an opening
+in a great mock-orange hedge. Before them a wide sweep of lawn led up
+to a formal dark façade; a tanbark path was washed, the grass ragged and
+uncut. Involuntarily they quickened their pace.
+
+Elim saw that towering brown pillars rose to the roof of the dwelling
+and that low wings extended on either hand. Before the portico a stiffly
+formal garden lay in withered neglect.
+
+The flower beds, circled with masoned rims and built up like wired
+bouquets, held only twisted and broken stems.
+
+A faint odor of wet plaster and dead vegetation rose to meet them. On
+the towering wall of the house every window was tightly shuttered. The
+place bore a silent and melancholy air of desertion.
+
+The girl gave a dismayed gasp. Elim hastily placed his load on the steps
+and, mounting, beat upon the door. Only a dull echo answered. Dust fell
+from the paneling upon his head.
+
+“Maybe they have shut up the front for protection,” he suggested. He
+made his way to the rear; all was closed. Through the low limbs of apple
+trees he could see a double file of small sad brick quarters for the
+slaves. They, too, were empty. The place was without a living being. He
+stood, undecided, when suddenly he heard Rosemary Roselle calling with
+an acute note of fear.
+
+He ran through the binding grass back to the garden.
+
+“Elim Meikeljohn!” She stumbled forward to meet him. “Oh, Elim,” she
+cried; “there's no one in the world----” A sob choked her utterance.
+
+He fell on his knees before her:
+
+“There's always me.”
+
+She sank in a fragrant heap into his arms.
+
+Elim Meikeljohn laughed over her shoulder at his entire worldly goods on
+the steps--the fragmentary fruit cake and a bottle of champagne.
+
+Here they are lost on the dimming mirror of the past.
+
+
+
+
+THE THRUSH IN THE HEDGE
+
+I
+
+Harry Baggs came walking slowly over the hills in the blue May dusk.
+He could now see below him the clustered roofs and tall slim stack of
+a town. His instinct was to avoid it, but he had tramped all day, his
+blurred energies were hardly capable of a detour, and he decided to
+settle near by for the night. About him the country rose and fell,
+clothed in emerald wheat and pale young corn, while trees filled the
+hollows with the shadowy purple of their darkening boughs. A robin piped
+a belated drowsy note; the air had the impalpable sweetness of beginning
+buds.
+
+A vague pleasant melancholy enveloped him; the countryside swam
+indistinctly in his vision--he surrendered himself to inward sensations,
+drifting memories, unformulated regrets. He was twenty and had a short
+powerful body; a broad dusty patient face. His eyes were steady, light
+blue, and his jaw heavy but shapely. His dress--the forlorn trousers,
+the odd coat uncomfortably drawn across thick shoulders, and incongruous
+hat--held patently the stamp of his worldly position: he was a tramp.
+
+He stopped, looking about. The road, white and hard, dipped suddenly
+down; on the right, windows glimmered, withdrawn behind shrubbery and
+orderly trees; on the left, a dark plowed field rose to a stiff company
+of pines and the sky. Harry Baggs stood turned in the latter direction,
+for he caught the faint odor of wood smoke; behind the field, a newly
+acquired instinct told him, a fire was burning in the open. This,
+now, probably meant that other wanderers--tramps--had found a place of
+temporary rest.
+
+Without hesitation he climbed a low rail fence, found a narrow path trod
+in the soft loam and followed it over the brow into the hollow beyond.
+His surmise was correct--a fire smoldered in a red blur on the ground,
+a few relaxed forms gathered about the wavering smoke, and at their back
+were grouped four or five small huts.
+
+Harry Baggs walked up to the fire, where, with a conventional sentence,
+he extended his legs to the low blaze. A man regarded him with a peering
+suspicious gaze; but any doubts were apparently laid, for the other
+silently resumed a somnolent indifference. His clothes were an amazing
+and unnecessary tangle of rags; his stubble of beard and broken black
+hat had an air of unreality, as though they were the stage properties of
+a stupid and conventional parody of a tramp.
+
+Another, sitting with clasped knees beyond the fire, interrupted a
+monotonous whining recital to question Harry Baggs. “Where'd you come
+from?”
+
+“Somewhere by Lancaster.”
+
+“Ever been here before?” And, when Baggs had said no: “Thought I hadn't
+seen you. Most of us here come back in the spring. It's a comfortable
+dump when it don't rain cold.” He was uncommonly communicative. “The
+Nursery's here for them that want work; and if not nobody's to ask you
+reasons.”
+
+A third, in a grimy light overcoat, with a short bristling red mustache
+and morose countenance, said harshly: “Got any money?”
+
+“Maybe two bits.”
+
+“Let's send him in for beer,” the other proposed; and a new animation
+stirred the dilapidated one and the talker.
+
+“You can go to hell!” Baggs responded without heat.
+
+“That ain't no nice way to talk,” the second proclaimed. “Peebles, here,
+meant that them who has divides with all that hasn't.”
+
+Peebles directed a hard animosity at Harry Baggs. His gaze flickered
+over the latter's heavy-set body and unmoved face. “Want your jaw
+slapped crooked?” he demanded with a degree of reservation.
+
+“No,” the boy placidly replied.
+
+A stillness enveloped them, accentuated by the minute crackling of the
+disintegrating wood. The dark increased and the stars came out; the
+clip-clip of a horse's hoofs passed in the distance and night. Harry
+Baggs became flooded with sleep.
+
+“I s'pose I can stay in one of these brownstones?” he queried,
+indicating the huts.
+
+No one answered and he stumbled toward a small shelter. He was forced to
+bend, edge himself into the close damp interior, where he collapsed into
+instant unconsciousness on a heap of bagging. In the night he cried out,
+in a young strangely distressed voice; and later a drift of rain fell on
+the roof and ran in thin cold streams over his still body.
+
+II
+
+He woke late the following morning and emerged sluggishly into a
+sparkling rush of sunlight. The huts looked doubly mean in the pellucid
+day. They were built of discarded doors and variously painted fragments
+of lumber, with blistered and unpinned roofs of tin, in which rusted
+smokepipes had been crazily wired; strips of moldy matting hung over an
+entrance or so, but the others gaped unprotected. The clay before them
+was worn smooth and hard; a replenished fire smoked within blackened
+bricks; a line, stretched from a dead stump to a loosely fixed post,
+supported some stained and meager red undergarb.
+
+Harry Baggs recognized Peebles and the loquacious tramp at the edge of
+the clearing. The latter, clad in a grotesquely large and sorry suit of
+ministerial black, was emaciated and had a pinched bluish countenance.
+When he saw Baggs he moved forward with a quick uneven step.
+
+“Say,” he proceeded, “can you let me have something to get a
+soda-caffeine at a drug store? This ain't a stall; I got a fierce
+headache. Come out with a dime, will you? My bean always hurts, but
+to-day I'm near crazy.”
+
+Harry Baggs surveyed him for a moment, and then, without comment,
+produced the sum in question. The other turned immediately and rapidly
+disappeared toward the road.
+
+“He's crazy, all right, to fill himself with that dope,” Peebles
+observed; “it's turning him black. You look pretty healthy,” he added.
+“You can work, and they're taking all the men they can get at the
+Nursery.”
+
+The boy was sharply conscious of a crawling emptiness--hunger. He had
+only fifteen cents; when that was gone he would be without resources. “I
+don't mind,” he returned; “but I've got to eat first.”
+
+“Can't you stick till night?” his companion urged. “There's only half a
+day left now. If you go later there'll be nothing doing till tomorrow.”
+
+“All right,” Harry Baggs assented.
+
+The conviction seized him that this dull misery of hunger and dirt had
+settled upon him perpetually--there was no use in combating it; and,
+with an animal-like stoicism, he followed the other away from the road,
+out of the hollow, to where row upon row of young ornamental trees
+reached in mathematical perspective to broad sheds, glittering expanses
+of glass, a huddle of toolhouses, and office.
+
+His conductor halted at a shed entrance and indicated a weather-bronzed
+individual.
+
+“Him,” he said. “And mind you come back when you're through; we all dish
+in together and live pretty good.”
+
+Harry Baggs spent the long brilliant afternoon burning bunches of
+condemned peach shoots. The smoke rolled up in a thick ceaseless cloud;
+he bore countless loads and fed them to the flames. The hungry crawling
+increased, then changed to a leaden nausea; but, accepting it as
+inevitable, he toiled dully on until the end of day, when he was given a
+dollar and promise of work to-morrow.
+
+He saw, across a dingy street, a small grocery store, and purchased
+there coffee, bacon and a pound of dates. Then he returned across the
+Nursery to the hollow and huts. More men had arrived through the day,
+other fires were burning, and an acrid odor of scorched fat and boiling
+coffee rose in the delicate evening. A small group was passing about
+a flasklike bottle; a figure lay in a stupor on the clay; a mutter of
+voices, at once cautious and assertive, joined argument to complaint.
+
+“Over this way,” Peebles called as Harry Baggs approached. The former
+inspected the purchased articles, then cursed. “Ain't you got a bottle
+on you?”
+
+But when the bacon had been crisped and the coffee turned into a
+steaming thick liquid, he was amply appreciative of the sustenance
+offered. They were shortly joined by Runnel, the individual with the
+bluish poisoned countenance, and the elaborately ragged tramp.
+
+“Did you frighten any cooks out of their witses?” Peebles asked the last
+contemptuously. The other retorted unintelligibly in his appropriately
+hoarse voice. “Dake knocks on back doors,” Peebles explained to Harry
+Baggs, “and then fixes to scare a nickel or grub from the women who
+open.”
+
+Quiet settled over the camp; the blue smoke of pipes and cigarettes
+merged imperceptibly into the dusk of evening. Harry Baggs was enveloped
+by a momentary contentment, born of the satisfaction of food, relaxation
+after toil; and, leaning his head back on clasped hands, he sang:
+
+  _“I changed my name when I got free
+    To Mister, like the res'.
+  But now ... Ol' Master's voice I hears
+    Across de river: 'Rome,
+  You damn ol' nigger, come and bring
+    Dat boat an' row me home!'”_
+
+His voice rolled out without effort, continuous as a flowing stream,
+grave and round as the deep tone of a temple bell. It increased in
+volume until the hollow vibrated; the sound, rather than coming from a
+single throat, seemed to dwell in the air, to be the harmony of evening
+made audible. The simple melody rose and fell; the simple words became
+portentous, burdened with the tragedy of vain longing, lost felicity.
+The dead past rose again like a colored mist over the sordid reality of
+the present; it drifted desirable and near across the hill; it soothed
+and mocked the heart--and dissolved.
+
+The silence that followed the song was sharply broken by a thin
+querulous question; a tenuous bent figure stumbled across the open.
+
+“Who's singing?” he demanded.
+
+“That's French Janin,” Peebles told Harry Baggs; “he's blind.”
+
+“I am,” the latter responded--“Harry Baggs.”
+
+The man came closer, and Baggs saw that he was old and incredibly worn;
+his skin clung in dry yellow patches to his skull, the temples were bony
+caverns, and the pits of his eyes blank shadows. He felt forward with
+a siccated hand, on which veins were twisted like blue worsted over
+fleshless tendons, gripped Harry Baggs' shoulder, and lowered himself to
+the ground.
+
+“Another song,” he insisted; “like the last. Don't try any cheap show.”
+
+The boy responded immediately; his serious voice rolled out again in a
+spontaneous tide.
+
+“'Hard times,'” Harry Baggs sang; “'hard times, come again no more.'”
+
+The old man said: “You think you have a great voice, eh? All you have to
+do to take the great roles is open your mouth!”
+
+“I hadn't thought of any of that,” Baggs responded. “I sing
+because--well, it's just natural; no one has said much about it.”
+
+“You have had no teaching, that's plain. Your power leaks like an old
+rain barrel. What are you doing here?”
+
+“Tramping.”
+
+Harry Baggs looked about, suddenly aware of the dark pit of being into
+which he had fallen. The fires died sullenly, deserted except for an
+occasional recumbent figure. Peebles had disappeared; Dake lay in
+his rags on the ground; Runnel rocked slowly, like a pendulum, in his
+ceaseless pain.
+
+“Tramping to the devil!” he added.
+
+“What started you?” French Janin asked.
+
+“Jail,” Harry Baggs answered.
+
+“Of course you didn't take it,” the blind man commented satirically; “or
+else you went in to cover some one else.”
+
+“I took it, all right--eighteen dollars.” He was silent for a moment;
+then: “There was something I had to have and I didn't see any other way
+of getting it. I had to have it. My stepfather had money that he put
+away--didn't need. I wanted an accordion; I dreamed about it till I got
+ratty, lifted the money, and he put me in jail for a year.
+
+“I had the accordion hid. I didn't tell them where, and when I got out
+I went right to it. I played some sounds, and--after all I'd done--they
+weren't any good. I broke it up--and left.”
+
+“You were right,” Janin told him; “the accordion is an impossible
+instrument, a thing entirely vulgar. I know, for I am a musician, and
+played the violin at the Opéra Comique. You think I am lying; but you
+are young and life is strange. I can tell you this: I, Janin, once led
+the finale of Hamlet. I saw that the director was pale; I leaned forward
+and he gave me the baton. I knew music. There were five staves to
+conduct--at the Opéra Comique.”
+
+He turned his sightless face toward Harry Baggs.
+
+“That means little to you,” he spoke sharply; “you know nothing. You
+have never seen a gala audience on its feet; the roses--”
+
+He broke off. His wasted palms rested on knees that resembled bones
+draped with maculate clothing; his sere head fell forward. Runnel paced
+away from the embers and returned. Harry Baggs looked, with doubt and
+wonderment, at the ruined old man.
+
+The mere word musician called up in him an inchoate longing, a desire
+for something far and undefined. He thought of great audiences, roses,
+the accompaniment of violins. Subconsciously he began to sing in a
+whisper that yet reached beyond the huts. He forgot his surroundings,
+the past without light, the future seemingly shorn of all prospect.
+
+French Janin moved; he fumbled in precarious pockets and at last
+produced a small bottle; he removed the cork and tapped out on his palm
+a measure of white crystalline powder, which he gulped down. Then
+he struggled to his feet and wavered away through the night toward a
+shelter.
+
+Harry Baggs imagined himself singing heroic measures; he finished, there
+was a tense pause, and then a thunderous acclamation. His spirit mounted
+up and up in a transport of emotional splendor; broken visions thronged
+his mind of sacrifice, renouncement, death. The fire expired and the
+night grew cold. His ecstasy sank; he became once more aware of the
+human wreckage about him, the detritus of which he was now a part.
+
+III
+
+He spent the next day moving crated plants to delivery trucks, where his
+broad shoulders were most serviceable, and in the evening returned to
+the camp, streaked with fine rich loam. French Janin was waiting for him
+and consumed part of Harry Baggs' unskilfully cooked supper. The old man
+was silent, though he seemed continually at the point of bursting into
+eager speech. However, he remained uncommunicative and followed the
+boy's movements with a blank speculative countenance. Finally he said
+abruptly:
+
+“Sing that song over--about the 'damn ol' nigger.'”
+
+Harry Baggs responded; and, at the end, Janin nodded.
+
+“What I should have expected,” he pronounced. “When I first heard you I
+thought: 'Here, perhaps, is a great voice, a voice for Paris;' but I was
+mistaken. You have some bigness--yes, good enough for street ballads,
+sentimental popularities; that is all.”
+
+An overwhelming depression settled upon Harry Baggs, a sense of
+irremediable loss. He had considered his voice a lever that might one
+day raise him out of his misfortunes; he instinctively valued it to
+an extraordinary degree; it had resembled a precious bud, the possible
+opening of which would flood his being with its fragrant flowering. He
+gazed with a new dread at the temporary shelters and men about him,
+the huts and men that resembled each other so closely in their patched
+decay.
+
+Until now, except in brief moments of depression, he had thought of
+himself as only a temporary part of this broken existence. But it was
+probable that he, too, was done--like Runnel, and Dake, who lived on the
+fear of women. He recalled with an oath his reception in the village of
+his birth on his return from jail: the veiled or open distrust of the
+adults; the sneering of the young; his barren search for employment. He
+had suffered inordinately in his narrow cell--fully paid, it had seemed,
+the price of his fault. But apparently he was wrong; the thing was to
+follow him through life--and he would live a long while--; condemning
+him, an outcast, to the company of his fellows.
+
+His shoulders drooped, his face took on the relaxed sullenness of those
+about him; curiously, in an instant he seemed more bedraggled, more
+disreputable, hopeless.
+
+French Janin continued:
+
+“Your voice is good enough for the people who know nothing. Perhaps it
+will bring you money, singing at fairs in the street. I have a violin, a
+cheap thing without soul; but I can get a thin jingle out of it. Suppose
+we go out together, try our chance where there is a little crowd; it
+will be better than piggin' in the earth.”
+
+It would, Baggs thought, be easier than carrying heavy crates; subtly
+the idea of lessened labor appealed to him. He signified his assent and
+rolled over on his side, staring into nothingness.
+
+French Janin went into the town the following day--he walked with a
+surprising facility and speed--to discover where they might find a
+gathering for their purpose. Harry Baggs loafed about the camp until the
+other returned with the failing of light.
+
+“The sales about the country are all that get the people together now,”
+ he reported; “the parks are empty till July. There's to be one tomorrow
+about eight miles away; we'll try it.”
+
+He went to the shelter, where he secured a scarred violin, with roughly
+shaped pegs and lacking a string. He motioned Harry Baggs to follow him
+and proceeded to the brow of the field, where he settled down against a
+fence, picking disconsolately at the burring strings and attempting
+to tighten an ancient bow. Baggs dropped beside him. Below them night
+flooded the winding road and deepened under the hedges; a window showed
+palely alight; the stillness was intense.
+
+“Now!” French Janin said.
+
+The violin went home beneath his chin and he improvised a thin but
+adequate opening for Harry Baggs' song. The boy, for the first time
+in his existence, sang indifferently; his voice, merely big, lacked
+resonance; the song was robbed of all power to move or suggest.
+
+Janin muttered unintelligibly; he was, Harry Baggs surmised, speaking
+his native language, obscurely complaining, accusing. They tried a
+second song: “Hard times, hard times, come again no more.” There was not
+an accent of longing nor regret.
+
+“That'll do,” French Janin told him; “good enough for cows and
+chickens.”
+
+He rose and descended to the camp, a bowed unsubstantial figure in the
+gloom.
+
+IV
+
+They started early to the sale. Janin, as always, walked swiftly, his
+violin wrapped in a cloth beneath his arm. Harry Baggs lounged sullenly
+at his side. The day was filled with a warm silvery mist, through which
+the sun mounted rayless, crisp and round. Along the road plum trees were
+in vivid pink bloom; the apple buds were opening, distilling palpable
+clouds of fragrance.
+
+Baggs met the morning with a sullen lowered countenance, his gaze on the
+monotonous road. He made no reply to the blind man's infrequent remarks,
+and the latter, except for an occasional murmur, fell silent. At last
+Harry Baggs saw a group of men about the fence that divided a small lawn
+and neatly painted frame house from the public road. A porch was filled
+with a confusion of furniture, china was stacked on the grass, and a bed
+displayed at the side.
+
+The sale had not yet begun; A youth, with a pencil and paper, was moving
+distractedly about, noting items; a prosperous-appearing individual,
+with a derby resting on the back of his neck, was arranging an open
+space about a small table. Beyond, a number of horses attached to dusty
+vehicles were hitched to the fence where they were constantly augmented
+by fresh arrivals.
+
+“Here we are!” Baggs informed his companion. He directed Janin forward,
+where the latter unwrapped his violin. A visible curiosity held the
+prospective buyers; they turned and faced the two dilapidated men on the
+road. A joke ran from laughing mouth to mouth. Janin drew his bow across
+the frayed strings; Harry Baggs cleared the mist from his throat. As he
+sang, aware of an audience, a degree of feeling returned to his tones;
+the song swept with a throb to its climax:
+
+  “'_You damn ol' nigger, come and bring
+  Dat boat an' row me home_!'”
+
+There was scattered applause.
+
+“Take your hat round,” Janin whispered; and the boy opened the gate and
+moved, with his battered hat extended, from man to man.
+
+Few gave; a careless quarter was added to a small number of pennies and
+nickels. Janin counted the sum with an unfamiliar oath.
+
+“That other,” he directed, and drew a second preliminary bar from his
+uncertain instrument.
+
+“Here, you!” a strident voice called. “Shut your noise; the sale's going
+to commence.”
+
+French Janin lowered the violin.
+
+“We must wait,” he observed philosophically. “These things go on and on;
+people come and go.”
+
+He found a bank, where he sat, after stumbling through a gutter of
+stagnant water. Harry Baggs followed and filled a cheap ornate pipe.
+The voice of the auctioneer rose, tiresome and persistent, punctuated by
+bids, haggling over minute sums for the absurd flotsam of a small
+house keeping square of worn oilcloth, a miscellany of empty jars. A
+surprisingly passionate argument arose between bidders; personalities
+and threats emerged. Janin said:
+
+“Listen! That is the world into which musicians are born; it is against
+such uproar we must oppose our delicate chords--on such hearts.” His
+speech rambled into French and a melancholy silence.
+
+“It's stopped for a little,” Baggs reminded him.
+
+Janin rose stiffly and the other guided him to their former place. The
+voice and violin rose, dominated a brief period, and the boy went among
+the throng, seeking newcomers. The mist thickened, drops of water shone
+on his ragged sleeves, and then a fine rain descended. The crowd filled
+the porch and lower floor, bulged apparently from door and windows.
+Harry Baggs made a motion to follow with his companion, but no one
+moved; there was no visible footing under cover. They stayed out
+stolidly in the wet, by an inadequate tree; and whenever chance offered
+Harry Baggs repeated his limited songs. A string of the violin broke;
+the others grew soggy, limp; the pegs would tighten no more and Janin
+was forced to give up his accompanying.
+
+The activities shifted to a shed and barn, where a horse and three sorry
+cows and farming implements were sold. Janin and Harry Baggs followed,
+but there was no opportunity for further melody; larger sums were here
+involved; the concentration of the buyers grew painful. The boy's throat
+burned; it was strained, and his voice grew hoarse. Finally he declared
+shortly that he was going back to the shelter by the Nursery.
+
+As they tramped over the rutted and muddy road, through a steadily
+increasing downpour, Harry Baggs counted the sum they had collected. It
+was two dollars and some odd pennies. Janin was closely attentive as the
+money passed through the other's fingers. He took it from Baggs' hand,
+re-counted it with an unfailing touch, and gave back a half.
+
+The return, even to the younger's tireless being, seemed interminable.
+Harry Baggs tramped doggedly, making no effort to avoid the deepening
+pools. French Janin struggled at his heels, shifting the violin from
+place to place and muttering incoherently.
+
+It was dark when they arrived at the huts; the fires were sodden mats
+of black ash; no one was visible. They stumbled from shelter to shelter,
+but found them full. One at last was discovered unoccupied; but they had
+no sooner entered than the reason was sharply borne upon them--the roof
+leaked to such an extent that the floor was an uneasy sheet of mud.
+However, there was literally nowhere else for them to go. Janin found
+a broken chair on which he balanced his bowed and shrunken form; Harry
+Baggs sat against the wall.
+
+He dozed uneasily, and, wakened by the old man's babbling, cursed
+him bitterly. At last he fell asleep; but, brought suddenly back to
+consciousness by a hand gripping his shoulder, he started up in a blaze
+of wrath.
+
+He shook off the hand and heard French Janin slip and fall against an
+insecure wall. The interior was absolutely black; Harry Baggs could see
+no more than his blind companion. The latter fumbled, at last regained a
+footing, and his voice fluctuated out of an apparent nothingness.
+
+“There is something important for you to know,” Janin proceeded.
+
+“I lied to you about your voice--I, once a musician of the orchestra
+at the Opéra Comique. I meant to be cunning and take you round to the
+fairs, where we would make money; have you sing truck for people who
+know nothing. I let you sing to-day, in the rain, for a dollar--while I,
+Janin, fiddled.
+
+“I am a _voyou_; there is nothing in English low enough. The thought of
+it has been eating at me like a rat.” The disembodied words stopped, the
+old man strangled and coughed; then continued gasping: “Attention! You
+have a supreme barytone, a miracle! I heard all the great voices for
+twenty years, and know.
+
+“At times there is a voice with perfect pitch, a true art and range;
+not many--they are cold. At times there is a singer with great heart,
+sympathy ... mostly too sweet.
+
+“But once, maybe, in fifty, sixty years, both are together. You are
+that--I make you amends.”
+
+The rain pounded fantastically on the roof a few inches above Harry
+Baggs' head and the water seeped coldly through his battered shoes;
+but, in the violent rebirth of the vague glow he had lost a short while
+before, he gave no heed to his bodily discomfort. “A supreme barytone!”
+ The walls of the hut, the hollow, dissolved before the sudden light
+of hope that enveloped him; all the dim dreams, the unformulated
+aspirations on which subconsciously his spirit had subsisted, returned.
+
+“Can you be sure?” he demanded uncertainly.
+
+“Absolutely! You are an artist, and life has wrung you out like a
+cloth--jail, hungry, outcast; yes, and nights with stars, and water
+shining; men like old Janin, dead men, begging on the roads--they are
+all in your voice, jumbled--serious barytone----” The high thin recital
+stopped, from exhaustion.
+
+Harry Baggs was warm to the ends of his fingers. He wiped his wet brow
+with a wetter hand.
+
+“That's fine,” he said impotently; “fine!”
+
+He could hear French Janin breathing stertorously; and, suddenly aware
+of the other's age, the misery of their situation, he asked:
+
+“Don't you feel good?”
+
+“I've been worse and better,” he replied. “This is bad for your throat,
+after singing all day in the rain. _Voyou_!” he repeated of himself.
+
+Silence enveloped them, broken by the creaking of the blind man's chair
+and the decreasing patter of the rain. Soon it stopped and Harry Baggs
+went outside; stars glimmered at the edges of shifting clouds, a sweet
+odor rose from the earth, a trailing scent of blossoming trees expanded.
+
+He sang in a vibrant undertone a stave without words. An uneasy form
+joined him; it was Runnel.
+
+“I b'lieve my head'll burst!” he complained.
+
+“Leave that soda-caffeine be.”
+
+He would never forget Runnel with his everlasting pain; or Dake, who
+lived by scaring women.... Great audiences and roses, and the roar of
+applause. He heard it now.
+
+V
+
+Harry Baggs returned to the Nursery, where, with his visions, his sense
+of justification, he was happy among the fields of plants. There he was
+given work of a more permanent kind; he was put under a watchful eye in
+a group transplanting berry bushes, definitely reassigned to that labor
+to-morrow. He returned to the camp with a roll of tar paper and, after
+supper, covered the leaking roof of the shelter. French Janin sat with
+his blank face following the other's movements. Janin's countenance
+resembled a walnut, brown and worn in innumerable furrows; his neck was
+like a dry inadequate stem. As he glanced at him the old man produced
+a familiar bottle and shook out what little powder, like finely ground
+glass, it contained. He greedily absorbed what there was and, petulantly
+exploring the empty container, flung it into the bushes. A nodding
+drowsiness overtook him, his head rolled forward, he sank slowly into a
+bowed amorphous heap. Harry Baggs roused him with difficulty.
+
+“You don't want to sit like this,” he said; “come up by the field, where
+it's fresher.”
+
+He lifted Janin to his feet, half carried him to the place under
+the fence. Harry Baggs was consumed by a desire to talk about the
+future--the future of his voice; he wanted to hear of the triumphs of
+other voices, of the great stages that they finally dominated. He wanted
+to know the most direct path there; he was willing that it should not be
+easy. “I'm as strong as an ox,” he thought.
+
+But he was unable to move French Janin from his stupor; in reply to his
+questions the blind man only muttered, begged to be let alone. Life was
+at such a low ebb in him that his breathing was imperceptible. Harry
+Baggs was afraid that he would die without a sound--leave him. He gave
+up his questioning and sang. He was swept to his feet by a great wave
+of feeling; with his head back, he sent the resonant volume of his tones
+toward the stars. Baggs stopped suddenly; stillness once more flooded
+the plowed hill and he raised imploring arms to the sky in a gust of
+longing.
+
+“I want to sing!” he cried. “That's all--to sing.”
+
+Janin was brighter in the morning.
+
+“You must have some exercises,” he told the boy. “I'll get new strings
+for the violin; it'll do to give you the pitch.”
+
+At the day's end they went again to the hilltop. French Janin tightened
+and tuned his instrument.
+
+“Now!” he measured, with poised bow. “Ah!” Both his voice and violin
+were tremulous, shrill; but they indicated the pitch of the desired
+note. “Ah!” the old man quavered, higher.
+
+“Ah!” Harry Baggs boomed in his tremendous round tone.
+
+They repeated the exercises until a slip of a new moon, like a wistful
+girl, sank and darkness hid the countryside. A palpitating chorus of
+frogs rose from the invisible streams. Somnolence again overtook Janin;
+the violin slipped into the fragrant grass by the fence, but his fingers
+still clutched the bow.
+
+Pity for the other stirred Baggs' heart. He wondered what had ruined
+him, brought him--a man who had played in an opera house--here. A bony
+elbow showed bare through a torn sleeve--the blind man had no shirt; the
+soles of his shoes gaped, smelling evilly. Yet once he had played in an
+orchestra; he was undoubtedly a musician. Life suddenly appeared grim, a
+sleepless menace awaiting the first opportune weakness by which to enter
+and destroy.
+
+It occurred to Harry Baggs for the first time that against such a hidden
+unsuspected blight his sheer strength would avail him little. He had
+stolen money; that in itself held danger to his future, his voice. He
+had paid for it; that score was clear, but he must guard against
+such stupidities in the years to come. He had now a conscious single
+purpose--to sing. A new sense of security took the place of his doubts.
+He stirred Janin from his collapsed sleep, directed him toward their
+hut.
+
+He returned eagerly in the evening to the vocal exercises. French Janin
+struggled to perform his part, but mostly Harry Baggs boomed out his
+Ahs! undirected. The other had been without his white powder for three
+days; his shredlike muscles twitched continually and at times he was
+unable to hold the violin. Finally:
+
+“Can you go in to the post-office and ask for a package for me at
+general delivery?” he asked Harry Baggs. “I'm expecting medicine.”
+
+“That medicine of yours is bad as Runnel's dope. I've a mind to let it
+stay.”
+
+The other rose, stood swaying with pinching fingers, tremulous lips.
+
+“I'm afraid I can't make it,” he whimpered.
+
+“Sit down,” Harry Baggs told him abruptly; “I'll go. Too late now to try
+pulling you up. Whatever it is, it's got you.”
+
+It was warm, almost hot. He walked slowly down the road toward the town.
+On the left was a smooth lawn, with great stately trees, a long gray
+stone house beyond. A privet hedge, broken by a drive, closed in
+the withdrawn orderly habitation. A young moon bathed the scene in a
+diffused silver light; low cultivated voices sounded from a porch.
+
+Harry Baggs stopped; he had never before seen such a concretely
+desirable place; it filled him with a longing, sharp like pain. Beyond
+the hedge lay a different world from this; he could not even guess its
+wide possession of ease, of knowledge, of facility for song. A voice
+laughed, gay and untroubled as a bird's note. He wanted to stay, seated
+obscurely on the bank, saturate himself with the still beauty; but the
+thought of French Janin waiting for the relief of his drug drove him on.
+
+The maple trees that lined the quiet streets of the town were in full
+early leaf. Groups paced tranquilly over the brick ways; the houses
+stood in secure rows. A longing for safety, recognition, choked at Harry
+Baggs' throat. He wanted to stop at the corner, talk, move home to a
+shadowy cool porch. He hurried in his ragged clothes past the pools of
+light at the street crossings into the kinder gloom. At that moment he
+would have surrendered his voice for a place in the communal peace about
+him.
+
+He reached the post-office and asked for a package addressed to
+Janin. The clerk delayed, regarded him with suspicion, but in the end
+surrendered a small precisely wrapped box. As he returned his mood
+changed; all he asked, he muttered bitterly, was a fair trial for
+his voice. He recognized obscurely that a singer's existence must be
+different from the constricted life of a country town; here were no
+stage, no audience, for the great harmonies he had imagined himself
+producing. He had that in his heart which would make mere security,
+content, forever impossible.
+
+In the dilapidated camp French Janin eagerly clutched the box. He almost
+filled his palm with the crystalline powder and gulped it hastily. Its
+effect was produced slowly.... Janin waited rigidly for the release of
+the drug.
+
+The evening following, under the fence on the hill, the blind man dozed
+while Harry Baggs exercised his voice.
+
+“Good!” the former pronounced unexpectedly. “I know; heard all the great
+voices for twenty years; a violin in the Opera Comique. Once I led the
+finale of Hamlet. I saw the Director stop.... He handed me the baton.
+He died soon after, and that was the beginning of my bad luck. I should
+have been Director; but I was ignored, and came to America--Buenos
+Aires; then Washington, and--and morphia.”
+
+There was a long silence and then he spoke again with a new energy:
+
+“I'm done, but you haven't started. You're bigger than ever I was;
+you'll go on and on. I, Janin, will train you; when you sing the great
+roles I'll sit in a box, wear diamond studs. Afterward, as we roll in a
+carriage down the Grandes Boulevards, the people in front of the cafés
+will applaud; the voice is appreciated in Paris.”
+
+“I have a lot to learn first,” Baggs put in practically.
+
+The old man recovered his violin. “Ah!” He drew the note tenuous but
+correct from the uncertain strings. “Ah!” Harry Baggs vociferated to the
+inattentive frogs, busy with their own chorus.
+
+VI
+
+The practice proceeded with renewed vigor through the evenings that
+followed; then French Janin sank back into a torpor, varied by acute
+depression.
+
+“I haven't got the life in me to teach you,” he admitted to Harry Baggs.
+“I'll be dead before you get your chance; besides, you ought to be
+practising all day, and not digging round plants and singing a little in
+the evening. You've got the voice, but that's not enough; you've got to
+work at exercises all your life.”
+
+“I'm strong,” Harry Baggs told him; “I can work more than most men.”
+
+“No, that won't do alone; you've got to go at it right, from the start;
+the method's got to be good. I'll be dead in some hospital or field when
+you'll be hardly starting. But remember it was Janin who found you,
+who dug you out of a set of tramps, gave you your first lessons.” He
+changed. “Stay along with me, Harry,” he begged; “take me with you.
+You're strong and'll never notice an old man. You will be making
+thousands some day. I will stop the morphia; perhaps I've got a good bit
+in me yet. Attention!” He raised the bow.
+
+“No!” he cried, interrupting. “Breathe deep, below the chest. Control!
+Control! Hold the note steady, in the middle; don't force it into your
+head.”
+
+His determination scion expired. Tears crept from under his sunken
+lids. He reached furtively into his pocket, took morphia. The conviction
+seized Harry Baggs that nothing could be accomplished here. The other's
+dejection was communicated to him. Where could he find the money, the
+time for the necessary laborious years of preparation? He was without
+credentials, without clothes; there was no one to whom he could go but
+the old spent man beside him. They were adrift together outside life, as
+the huts they inhabited were outside the orderly town beyond the hill.
+
+He rose, left Janin, and walked slowly along the fence to the road. The
+moon had increased in size and brilliancy; the apple trees had bloomed
+and their fallen petals glimmered on the ground. He thought of the house
+on the smooth sward, with its hedge and old trees; a sudden longing
+seized him to linger at its edge, absorb again the profound peaceful
+ease; and he quickened his pace until he was opposite the low gray
+façade.
+
+He sat on the soft steep bank, turned on his elbow, gazing within. The
+same voices drifted from the porch, voices gay or placid, and contained
+laughter. A chair scraped. It was all very close to Harry Baggs--and in
+another world. There was a movement within the house; a window leaped
+into lighted existence and then went out against the wall. Immediately
+after, a faint pure harmony of strings drifted out to the hedge. It was
+so unexpected, so lovely, that Harry Baggs sat with suspended breath.
+The strings made a pattern of simple harmony; and then, without warning,
+a man's voice, almost like his own, began singing. The tones rose fluid
+and perfect, and changed with feeling. It seemed at first to be a man;
+and then, because of a diminuendo of the voice, a sense of distance not
+accounted for by his presence near the hedge, he knew that he heard a
+record of the actual singing.
+
+The voice, except for its resemblance to his own, did not absorb his
+attention; it was the song itself that thrilled and held him. He had
+never before heard music at once so clear and capable of such depths.
+He realized instinctively, with a tightening of his heart, that he was
+listening to one of the great songs of which Janin had spoken. It hung
+for a minute or more in his hearing, thrilling every nerve, and then
+died away. It stopped actually, but its harmony rang in Harry Baggs'
+brain. Instantly it had become an essential, a permanent part of his
+being. It filled him with a violent sense of triumph, a richness of
+possession that gave birth to a new unconquerable pride.
+
+He rose, waited for a short space; but nothing more followed. He was
+glad of that; he had no wish to blur the impressions of the first. Harry
+Baggs hurried up the road and crossed the field to where he had left
+French Janin. The latter was still sleeping, crumpled against
+the vegetation. Baggs grasped the thin shoulder, shook him into
+consciousness.
+
+“I have just heard something,” he said. “Listen! What is it?”
+
+He sang without further preliminary, substituting a blank phrasing for
+uncomprehended words; but the melody swept without faltering to its
+conclusion. Janin answered irritably, disturbed by his rude awakening:
+
+“The Serenade from Don Giovanni--Mozart. Well, what about it?”
+
+“It's wonderful!” Harry Baggs declared. “Are there any more as great?”
+
+“It is good,” Janin agreed, his interest stirred; “but there are
+better--the Dio Possente, the Brindisi from Hamlet. Once I led the
+finale of Hamlet. I saw the Director----”
+
+“I'll get every one,” the boy interrupted.
+
+“There are others now, newer--finer still, I'm told; but I don't know.”
+ Janin rose and steadied himself against the fence. “Give me a start.
+I've been getting confused lately; I don't seem to keep a direction like
+I could. From Don Giovanni: _'Deh vieni alla finestra_'--'Come to the
+window' 's about it. I'm glad you're not a tenor; they're delicate and
+mean. But you are a fine boy, Harry; you'll take the old man up along
+with you!”
+
+He talked in a rapid faint voice, like his breathing. Harry Baggs
+grasped his arm and led him down to their shanty. French Janin entered
+first, and immediately the other heard a thin complaint from within:
+
+“Somebody's got that nice bed you made me.”
+
+Harry Baggs went into the hut and, stooping, shook a recumbent shape.
+
+“Get out of the old man's place!” he commanded.
+
+A string of muffled oaths responded.
+
+“There's no reserved rooms here.”
+
+“Get out!” Baggs insisted.
+
+The shape heaved up obscurely and the boy sent him reeling through the
+door. French Janin sank with weary relief on the straw and bagging. He
+grasped the thick young arm above him.
+
+“We won't be long in this,” he declared; “diamond studs!”
+
+He fell asleep instantly, with his fingers caught in Harry Baggs'
+sleeve. The latter, with the supreme egotism of youth, of a single
+ambition, loosened the hand and moved out of the narrow confinement of
+the shanty. He wanted space, the sky, into which to sing his imaginary
+triumphant songs.
+
+VII
+
+The next day moved toward its end without arresting incident. Janin
+and Harry Baggs had walked to the public road, where they stood leaning
+against the rail fence. The smoke from Baggs' pipe uprose in unbroken
+spheres; the evening was definitely hot. French Janin said:
+
+“In the town to-day I asked about that house here at the bend. It seems
+he's got money; comes for a couple of months in the spring--just like
+us--and then goes to Europe like as not. Perhaps he knows a voice.”
+
+The blind man fell silent, contemplative.
+
+“Trouble is,” he broke out fretfully, “we've got nothing to sing. That
+about the 'damn old nigger' won't do. You ought to know something like
+the Serenade.
+
+“Well,” he added after a moment, “why not? I could teach you the
+words--it's Italian; you've nearly got the air. It's all wrong and
+backward; but this isn't the Conservatoire. You can forget it when you
+have started; sing exercises again.”
+
+“When can we begin?” Harry Baggs asked.
+
+“We'll brush our clothes up best we can,” Janin proceeded, absorbed
+in his planning, “and go up to the porch of an evening. 'Mr.
+Brinton'--that's his name--I'll say, 'I'm M. Janin, once of the
+orchestra at the Opera Comique, and I'd like you to listen to a pupil of
+mine. I've heard them all and this boy is better----'” He stopped; took
+morphia.
+
+“Can't you stop that for a day?” Harry Baggs demanded desperately.
+“Can't you?”
+
+He watched with bitter rebellion the inevitable slackening of the
+other's being, the obfuscation of his mind. Janin hung over the fence,
+with hardly more semblance of life than an incredibly tattered and empty
+garment.
+
+“Come on, you old fool!” Baggs exclaimed, burning with impatience,
+balked desire; he half carried him brusquely to his bed.
+
+Yet, under the old man's fluctuating tuition, he actually began the
+Serenade within twenty-four hours. “_Deh vieni alla finestra_,” French
+Janin pronounced. “_Deh vieni_----” Harry Baggs struggled after him. His
+brow grew wet with the intensity of his effort; his tongue, it seemed to
+him, would never accomplish the desired syllables.
+
+Janin made a determined effort to live without his drug; the abstinence
+emphasized his fragility and he was cold, even in the heart of the long
+sunny day; but the effort stayed him with a flickering vitality, bred
+visions, renewed hopes of the future. He repeated the names of places,
+opera houses--the San Carlo, in Naples; the Scala--unknown to Harry
+Baggs, but which came to him with a strange vividness. The learning of
+the Serenade progressed slowly; French Janin forgot whole phrases, some
+of which returned to memory; one entire line he was forced to supply
+from imagination.
+
+At last the boy could sing it with a degree of intelligence; Janin
+translated and reconstructed the scene, the characters.
+
+“You ought to have some good clothes,” he told Harry Baggs; he spoke
+again of the necessity of a diamond stud.
+
+“Well, I haven't,” the other stated shortly. “They'll have to listen to
+me without looking.”
+
+He borrowed a rusted razor and subjected himself to the pain of an
+awkward shaving; then inadequately washed his sole shirt and looped the
+frayed collar with a nondescript tie.
+
+The night was immaculate; the moon, past the full, cast long segments of
+light and shadow across the countryside. Harry Baggs drew a deep breath:
+
+“We might as well go.”
+
+French Janin objected; he wasn't ready; he wasn't quite sure of what he
+was going to say. Then:
+
+“I haven't anything to show. Perhaps they will laugh at me--at Janin, of
+the Opéra Comique. I couldn't allow that.”
+
+“I'm going to sing,” the boy reminded him; “if it's any good they won't
+laugh. If what you say's right they'll have to believe you.”
+
+“I feel bad to-night, too, in my legs.”
+
+“Get your violin.”
+
+A fresh difficulty arose: French Janin positively refused to play on his
+present instrument before a critical audience.
+
+“It's as thin as a cat,” he protested. “Do you want me to make a show of
+myself?”
+
+“All right; I'll sing alone. Come on!”
+
+Janin's legs were uncertain; he stumbled over the path to the road and
+stopped at the fence. He expressed fresh doubts, the hesitation of old
+age; but Harry Baggs silenced him, forced him on. A cold fear possessed
+the boy, which he resolutely suppressed: if Janin were wrong, his voice
+worthless, if they laughed, he was done. Opportunity, he felt, would
+never return. With his voice scorned, no impetus remained; he had no
+other interest in life, no other power that could subdue the slight
+inward flaw.
+
+He saw this in a vivid flash of self-knowledge.... If he couldn't sing
+he would go down, lower than Janin; perhaps sink to the level of Dake.
+
+“Come on!” he repeated grimly, assisting his companion over the luminous
+white road.
+
+Janin got actually feebler as he progressed. He stopped, gasping, his
+sightless face congested.
+
+“I'll have to take a little,” he whispered, “just a taste. That puts
+life in me; it needs a good deal now to send me off.”
+
+He produced the familiar bottle and absorbed some powder. Its effect was
+unexpected--he straightened, walked with more ease; but it acted upon
+his mind with surprising force.
+
+“I want to stop just a little,” he proclaimed with such an air of
+decision that Harry Baggs followed him without protest to the fragrant
+bank. “You're a good fellow,” Janin went on, seated; “and you're going
+to be a great artist. It'll take you among the best. But you will have
+a hard time for a while; you won't want anybody hanging on you. I'd only
+hurt your chances--a dirty old man, a drugtaker. I would go back to
+it, Harry; it's got me, like you said. People wouldn't have me round.
+I doubt if I'd be comfortable with them. They'd ask me why I wasn't
+Director.”
+
+“Come on,” Baggs repeated for the third time; “it's getting late.”
+
+He lifted French Janin to his feet and forced him on. “You don't know
+life,” the other continued. “You would get sick of me; you might get
+influenced to put me in a Home. I couldn't get my breath right there.”
+
+Harry Baggs forced him over the road, half conscious of the protesting
+words. The fear within him increased. Perhaps they wouldn't even listen
+to him; they might not be there.
+
+His grip tightened on French Janin; he knew that at the first
+opportunity the old man would sink back into the oblivion of morphia.
+
+“I've done all I could for you, Harry”--the other whimpered. “I've
+been some--good. Janin was the first to encourage you; don't expect too
+much.”
+
+“If I get anywhere, you did it,” Harry Baggs told him.
+
+“I'd like to see it all,” French Janin said. “I know it so well. Who'd
+have thought”--a dull amazement crept into his voice--“that old Janin,
+the sot, did it?... And you'll remember.”
+
+They stopped opposite the entrance to the place they sought. Harry Baggs
+saw people on the porch; he recognized a man's voice that he had heard
+there before. On the right of the drive a thick maple tree cast a deep
+shadow, but beyond it a pool of clear moonlight extended to the house.
+He started forward, but Janin dragged him into the gloom of the maple.
+
+“Sing here,” he whispered in the boy's ear; “see, the window--_Deh vieni
+alla finestra_.”
+
+Harry Baggs stood at the edge of the shadow; his throat seemed to
+thicken, his voice expire.
+
+“No,” he protested weakly; “you must speak first.”
+
+He felt the old man shaking under his hand and a sudden desperate calm
+overtook him.
+
+He moved forward a little and sang the first phrase of the Serenade.
+
+A murmur of attention, of surprised amusement, arose from the porch;
+then, as his voice gained in bigness, flowed rich and thrilling and
+without effort from his deep powerful lungs, the murmur died away. The
+song rose toward its end; Harry Baggs saw nothing but the window above
+him; he put all the accumulated feeling, the longing, of the past
+miserable years into his ending.
+
+A silence followed, in which Harry Baggs stood with drooping head. Then
+an unrestrained patter of applause followed; figures advanced. French
+Janin gave the boy a sharp unexpected shove into the radiance beyond the
+tree.
+
+“Go on and on,” he breathed; “and never come back any more!”
+
+He turned and shambled rapidly away into the shadows, the obscurity,
+that lined the road.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Happy End, by Joseph Hergesheimer
+
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